warnings: mentions of drugs, suicidal thoughts
Chapter 20: Will & Wolfgang
In which Will and Wolfgang have a chat
It's been five days since Will's last hit, and the worst of the withdrawal symptoms seem to be gone.
He lies curled on the ground, sleeping in fits and bursts, never more than a couple hours at a time. Mostly he exists in a kind of exhausted stupor, his body tired beyond belief, while his brain, wide awake, screams for drugs, for death, for something.
The weight of the past settles in his stomach, spreads out into his heart and throat and lungs like some kind of toxic sludge.
He replays the last couple years in his mind's eye, sees himself as a junkie and a thief and a whore. He thinks of all the people who've had their way with him in back alleys. He can still feel their hands on his body. It makes him want to vomit.
It was easy, before, because he never used to care. He'd do whatever the fuck he had to do to make money and then he'd get high and that was that, no big deal.
Only now it feels like a very big deal.
o - o - o
The others come and go, and wake and sleep, and to distract himself, Will watches.
He memorizes the rhythm of their existence, the details of their lives: How Kala's duffle is full of books. How Sun hides food beneath her sleeping bag. How Riley goes out behind the church in the dead of night and stays there for hours. How Capheus leaves with his bike before dawn.
How the girls depart together a few hours later, just as Lito and Felix and Wolfgang return and go to sleep, jumbled together on the mattress. How sometimes Lito wakes up crying, or Wolfgang wakes up shaking, or Felix wakes up gasping for breath.
(Will turns away his face, tries not to eavesdrop as they comfort each other in low voices. It's okay, he hears anyway. You're okay. You're safe. He's dead. They're gone.)
How the three of them head out to work as the sun begins to set. How Capheus and Riley and Kala and Sun come back at dusk.
The rhythm repeats, and Will clings to it, and slowly but surely, another day passes.
o - o - o
He wakes up to the sound of a paper bag crunching down in front of his face, inhales the scent of food.
He looks up to find Wolfgang staring down at him, arms crossed.
"Eat," he says.
Will stares at the bag. It's McDonald's. "I'm not hungry," he mutters, which isn't exactly true. He's nowhere near as hungry as he probably should he, since he can't remember the last time he had something to eat, but there's a hollowness in his stomach that wasn't there yesterday.
"Yeah, that's what heroin does," says Wolfgang. "Suppresses appetite. You need to eat anyway. Kala says so." He toes the bag an inch closer to Will. "I told her I'd force-feed you this shit if I had to."
"I— I feel bad when you guys spend money on me," Will mumbles, turning away his face. I don't want to eat, he thinks. I don't want to do exist.
"Too bad," says Wolfgang. "Come on. Get up." He crouches down and reaches into the bag. "What do you want," he asks, "burger or fries?"
"I—" Will sighs in resignation, sitting up slightly. "Burger," he says.
Wolfgang hands him a burger. It's warm and the wrapper is greasy and his empty stomach leaps at the smell.
"Wolfgang," he says quietly.
"What?"
Will glances over at Wolfgang, who's staring at him stonily, then back down at the burger. "Do you ever hate yourself?" he asks.
"Sometimes, yeah," Wolfgang says. He shifts position slightly, so he's sitting cross-legged, and pulls a couple french fries out of the bag. "Why?"
"I hate myself so much right now," Will whispers. "I just keep thinking— The things I did to make money— all the bikes I stole and pockets I picked and—" He closes his eyes. "I let people do fucking disgusting things to me. And I did disgusting things back."
"Sex isn't disgusting," says Wolfgang, popping a fry into his mouth.
"But it feels disgusting," says Will. "When I think about it."
"Don't think about it."
Will shakes his head. "I can't. I try and I just can't. I don't get how you do it, honestly," he admits softly. "How you can stand not being high all the time."
"Well I've never gotten high," shrugs Wolfgang. "Guess I don't know what I'm missing."
"Yeah, but— Doesn't it ever get to be too much?" Will hesitates, unsure how to explain the toxic sludge feeling in his chest, the desire to tear off his own skin and hose down his insides until he drowns. "Haven't you ever just wished you were dead or something?" he asks at last, quietly. "Like really wished it?"
Wolfgang goes still. "Yes," he says, eyes narrowed. "I have."
"So what do you do?" Will asks. "I mean— you're still alive, so obviously…" He lowers his eyes, holding onto the burger so tightly that he can feel it squishing under his fingers.
Wolfgang inhales deeply, then lets out a sigh. "Okay," he says. "Listen. I don't talk about this shit much, but I've been on the streets since I was thirteen. And at first things were..." He pauses, eats a fry. "They were bad, okay? After a couple months I started thinking, what's the point of this? And I decided there was none. So I gave up. Just curled up in an alley and waited to die."
"What happened?" asks Will.
Wolfgang chuckles slightly. "I got hungry," he says. "So fucking hungry. My stomach had never hurt that bad before. It was all I could think about. And I realized that... my body, it wasn't gonna let me die without putting up a fight, you know? It still wanted to live. And after I realized that there was part of me that wanted to live, I just... obeyed it. Like how an animal would. Don't starve, don't freeze, don't get killed, you know?" He shrugs. "That's how I made it through the winter. I had nothing to live for, I was fucking miserable, every single day I wanted to die. But I just focused on the part of me that was hungry and the part of me that was cold and the part of me that had to take a shit or whatever, because those were the parts of me that were still fighting. Eventually I met Felix and... yeah. Things got better. But I know sometimes life is like a goddamn fight to the death. And sometimes you're fighting against your own self. But there's always a part of you that wants to keep going. You just have to find it."
Will peels back the wrapper of the burger. "I guess— maybe I am a little hungry," he mutters.
"See?" says Wolfgang. "Now eat up."
Will takes a bite. And another, and another. The burger settles comfortably in his stomach.
And for the first time in days, the present seems realer than the past.