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Euphoria

Chapter 8: Anxiety

Sunday

11:38 am

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She wore a canary yellow dress which brought out the sienna in her eyes. He didn't know what he was wearing and he didn't care. The meadow was green, the sky blue. Stalks of tall grass flowed about his waist and tickled his open palms in a pleasurable, summery way. When he tiled his head back he saw storybook puffs of cloud, exactly the right shade of white against cornflower blue. A patchwork of fields swelled in all directions over soft hills: a quaint village was nestled in one of the valleys, the perfect distance away.

She was laughing. Her laughter was better than the countryside, the fine weather, and the dress combined.

Through the grassland she trod a path with her bare feet. Red Admiral butterflies frolicked in her wake, darting occasionally towards her form until they changed their dithering minds again, pining for the taste of nectar on opaline flesh. He followed too.

The field smelt predominantly of hay, but underneath was the perfume of flowers in bloom. Buttercups and periwinkles grew in the shelter of hedgerows, woven together so that even wayward children couldn't untie them.

She had come to a stop above a dip in the land. From up here it seemed like the whole world spilled out underneath their feet. Some way below a river flowed smoothly, its waters so still as to become a sheet of glass mirroring the countenance of the sky; the sun was one winking eye. Trees, the most verdant he had ever seen, fashioned a lust belt of emerald around the brook.

His body hummed as it naturally attuned itself to the vitality of the terrain. Thrumming cicadas kept up the organic rhythm. It was such an unusual feeling, to be tranquil. To be truly alive.

He gave a contented sigh and, looking to his right, allowed his iceberg eyes to roam her outline. The yellow dress, which reminded him of homemade lemon cake, wafted around her thighs in the breeze. Her arms hung loosely but not gawkily. Shoulder-length hazel hair had been tucked behind her ears. When she was happy dimples sometimes formed on her cheeks and when something really delighted her she would bend over, her hands on her knees, all creased up in mirth, as if to say, stop, I can't take any more!

Now, though, she was just smiling. She stood next to him in profile so he only saw half of her upturned lips. Her gaze travelled across the rich, multicoloured panorama facing them and with every new feature she picked out, her tangerine eyes grew larger and larger.

After a time she realised that he was watching her. She glanced shrewdly at him through her peripheral vision. Then she couldn't keep up her smirk, because the sunlight was making her happy and mellow, so she laughed again, shook her head, and turned to face him.

"I'm so glad you came. I've been wanting to show you."

He thought her voice sounded like a part of the landscape, like wheat fields and fertile earth.

She took his hands in her own. The sun blazed, the river rippled, and her skin was balmy to the touch.

"Dance with me," she said.

Regrettably, he did not appear to be in control of his mouth. When no reply came she tilted her head to one side and unconsciously licked her lips. Somewhere in the distance a heron let out a harsh call.

"Please, will you dance?"

She towed him fondly from the edge of the dale, back into their flourishing pasture. A butterfly flapped close. She batted it away with a kind hand. The living sea of grass submitted to their trampling and the soil smelled dry but was reassuringly pliant. A smile, a wink, and next she'd moved his palm down so that it rested on her hip.

Before the cogs in his brain started turning she had clasped herself close to him; her head was resting in the groove of his collarbone. He could feel the contours of her body moulding to fit his own frame. Tickling his neck was hot breath from her small, round mouth. As though they were enchanted, they began to move together, two decorated dolls getting their legs wet in the dew. He rocked her, arms coiled around her waist with one thumb rubbing a circle in the cotton against her midriff, and although he could not see the ground he was careful not to step on her toes. She let out a little serene murmur. It was more like swaying than dancing, but it was enough. A tenderness entered his arctic eyes while he looked past her to the greens, the blues, the golds.

The earthy hues billowed out until they blended into the sky and he and she were as one.

Warmth grew between them. He treasured the luscious scorching even more than he treasured the potpourri of flowers, or the starling singing from a nearby tree.

At some point he became aware that whilst his mind had been fixed only on his partner silence had stifled the land, and the wind had dropped. He was ill at ease. Doubt niggled at his brain, splintering the fairytale perfection. There was too much heat - too much liquid sweltering at his lower torso - far too much - feverishly he jerked her away from him, and then he saw it, a seeping patch of scarlet splayed across her a stomach.

He tried to yell but was unable.

The sticky fluid had soaked through to his own clothing. On her middle it leached without difficulty through soft yellow fabric, moving at a revolting rate, like poppies seizing the territory of sunflowers.

Hysteria quickly took hold. He forced his hands against the pooling area at her abdomen but this only stained his palms. Firetruck red began to trickle onto the grass below. Ripping off part of his shirt, he mashed that too into the bloodied orifice, but still it came oozing out, until everything he saw was glazed in gore. All the colours had gone, had fused into ruby. The sky was vermilion and in it hung a great burgundy orb, blazing, a wide screaming mouth.

All he could think to do now was to look up at her face. Although it was tinted like an inferno it was still undeniably lovely; those eyes still gleamed.

She was laughing. A grin cut through her face and a high-pitched giggle floated above the lifeless earth. She was bleeding to death, her body was painting the whole world red, and she was laughing.

Norman jolted himself awake.

The young man was slick with sweat and his apartment was so bright. He sat upright, compressing his palms into his eye sockets, incapable of taking in all the sudden illumination scalding his cornea.

Jayden winced and opened one eye, blinked, closed it again, then groaned and let his head fall back. Everything returned to him in a flood.

Last night had been a bad night. He'd made it home unharmed somehow, had avoided crashing the car, had skidded it to an uneven stop, and had virtually crawled into the flat, every inch of him soaked, aching, rundown. Mostly it was murky snapshots, rather than one long continuous film of memory, but he knew that he'd drunk far too much and used up at least half a vial of Tripto. His skull felt like a firing squad was practicing inside.

Despite all that, he was still here in one piece. Maybe his metabolism was becoming accustomed to large quantities of drugs assaulting his system? No. God, that's stupid. He knew full well how lethal alcohol and narcotics could be when consumed simultaneously.

What a fucking miracle I didn't get myself killed.

Norman chanced opening his eyes again, finding that this time he could handle the light levels. He saw a pile of wet clothes had been flung on the floor. From what he could tell of the living room from his vantage point in bed, it looked to be an absolute mess. The stench of vomit reached him from the bathroom. Somewhere a tap was dripping sporadically and irritating his delicate brain no end.

On the opposite side of his apartment windows a light shower of mid-morning rain, too light to warrant a raincoat but just heavy enough to be an aggravation, was demoralising Washington. The sky was matted with an unbroken stratum of slate grey cloudforms. It seemed that yesterday's thunderstorm had passed, leaving behind its signature epilogue of drab fog and a strange limpid pessimism.

But the current climate was the least of his worries: he'd been having nightmares.

There was no doubt in his mind as to the identity of the woman from his dream. When he shut his eyes, he could still imagine her hideously joyous face on the black and red canvas of his eyelids.

Melissa.

He didn't want to consider the significance of her lurid manifestation to his subconsciousness. Nor did he have any desire to think about - to even remember - the revelation which had spurred on his idiotic debacle the previous night. Instead, he swung his legs stiffly out of bed and lumbered to his feet, allowing his migraine to successfully eradicate all intelligible thought from his being.

Making his way out of the room, he came across some items that helped to fill in the gaps of what had occurred the night before. A pair of shoes were wedged illogically in the doorway. Numerous liquor bottles were arranged on the coffee table like a drunken police line-up, and the portable DVD player had been shoved with disrespect to one side. A lamp had been knocked over one way or another; several of the books on their shelves were disrupted; the place bore the mark of a lunatic's muddlings.

His tongue was fuzzy, his jaw coarse from stubble. The man headed straight for the kitchen and poured himself a pint of water which he downed in one spluttering gulp.

There were things to do: he had to clean up, take a shower, scrub the stinking bathroom. Hell, I need to destroy that goddamned DVD. Of course the real root of his dilemma was put away in the back of his mind, stuffed in a neat little box, completely ignored by Norman as he was so wont to do with all of his troubles.

But those trivial matters could wait, at least for a while. What mattered most to Jayden right now was placating a very desperate, very dire need which had manipulated itself into his subliminal psyche, a requirement whose deficit always felt like a chill stone slab rigid against him.

He couldn't be alone. Now more than any other time, he just needed company. He didn't want to lie in an empty bed. His loathing of self was growing with every overdose, with every self-pitying minute, and since he had no way to curb it, he wanted to forget about it in the throes of lust. He simply couldn't trust himself to survive another long night without drugging himself halfway to the moon, and with the knowledge that he now held… and I'm lonely. So very lonely. His life was principally false; he had been lied to, fooled like the fool he was; and as his dream had so insolently pointed out, he had no Melissa. It was too much for one man alone to bear.

Returning to the living room, Norman rummaged on his desk for the slip of paper he knew was there. As he recalled it was small, inconspicuous, and probably hidden beneath several day's worth of clutter. Upon it had been scribbled a phone number in girlish handwriting. Call me. It had been written in good faith, good sincere faith, yet he'd never intended to commence communication or fulfil any part of his physical pledge. He'd wanted her for one night, and he'd had her - that was all. Fate was scornful, however. Now more than anything he needed the woman he had spent the night with several days before, that black-haired beauty, that Tiffany or Tracey or Tess.

He picked up the phone and dialled the numbers, his fingers oily on the dark plastic, and he felt like the devil. How far have you slipped? This was not the right thing for him to be doing. He was supposed to be solving the case. He was supposed to be coping.

What would he say to her? He'd done it before; he had confidence in the act. Then why did it feel so wrong, like a contract being breached, like a promise being broken?

Never mind. It was ringing now.

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It was an endless morning for Melissa Donahue. She found herself entertaining shifting, imprecise half-thoughts.

The day was dreary with a sort of passive animosity, sending the inhabitants of Washington DC into a dull and apathetic stupor. Out of the small windows of her temporary apartment, she could see pedestrians crawling by on the sidewalk, oblivious to the world. The drizzle blocked light from entering the flat and imbued it with a strange, ghostly dimness. In the kitchen all of the surfaces looked pale and grey.

She'd awoken that morning with a head full of buzzing questions she couldn't silence long enough to define. The drab atmosphere had filled her with a paradoxical urge to be alive, to spend her day constructively. She had tried to overview some case files but the thin paper felt unreal at her fingertips. When she went to get herself a glass of water, her eyes caught onto the stove standing in the kitchen. It was only thing in the whole apartment that was bright, attracting the solitary ray of a muted glow cascading from the window, its metallic surfaces glinting sharp like a razorblade: and she knew she wanted to run her hands all over it, to explore its facets and corners. She wanted to cook. Melissa treasured cookery in the same way rich men treasure golf at the weekends. It reminded her of her father.

She had tried to make pancakes, summoning memories as she did of warm summer breakfasts, butter melting on toast, her father's smile. Whisking eggs and flour was a sort of poetry, like making verse out of plain verbs and adjectives.

As a child her father had shown her the correct way to crack an egg flawlessly over a bowl, but she had always managed to yellow her fingers with yolk. No, Melissa, honey - this way. Like so. Now she rapped the egg once, twice, against the rim and it broke cleanly in half. It made her sad. She felt something fracturing within her as well, spilling forth warm and viscous, something which could not be recovered.

While she was waiting for the pancakes to cool, Melissa thought about Norman. He was a danger to her. She bit at a nail and leant against the fridge, trying to formulate a strategy. Silly girl, foolish girl… How could she come undone so easily? A bottle of wine, a touch, and a friendly glance. Was that all it took to sweep her away into a dream? A firm plan was needed. She couldn't keep away from Norman Jayden, but she could endure to be professional and impassive. The best thing would clearly be to act like it had never happened. Could she manage that? She decided she could. Yes, okay.

Tasting her pancakes, the agent realised that something had gone wrong somewhere along the way. They were too thin, too watery, not the way her father made them. She poured syrup onto them but they didn't seem to taste any better. She was distracted.

Melissa sat at the cold, unwholesome dining room table now, the plate of unappealing pancakes at her side. She handled a fork absent-mindedly, poking at the food without looking at it. Then she pushed the plate away and rested her head in her empty arms.

I hope I'm not letting you down.

She watched the window as tiny quivering raindrops tried with all their might to leave an imprint on the unconquerable glass.