A Chemical Fire (3 page)

Take four at noon, eat forty minutes later for full effect with no nausea. Wait seven hours, take four, eat forty minutes later. Good chance to re-up without getting sick. Seven hours. Two am, four pills, food forty later. Go to sleep in a couple hours and wake up really, really groggy. Do best to wake up fully by twelve.

Take four at noon, eat forty minutes later for full effect with no nausea. Wait seven hours, take four, eat forty minutes later. Good chance to re-up without getting sick. Seven hours. Two am, four pills, food forty later. Go to sleep in a couple hours and wake up really, really groggy. Do best to wake up fully by twelve.

“Mr. Cotard,” Keith raises his hand halfway. “Aren’t hormones what make you, you know…horny?”

“You’re thinking of Penthouse,” I say. He grins, looking at the others who are already snickering.

Take four at noon, eat forty minutes later. Full effect with no nausea. Wait seven hours, take four, eat forty minutes later. Good chance to re-up without getting sick. Seven hours. Two am, four pills, food forty later. Go to sleep in a couple hours and wake up really, really groggy. Do best to wake up fully by twelve.

“No, you’re right, and they do a lot more too, depending on the hormone. Everything from puberty, which you guys can blame for your sudden sexual interest and damn-the-man attitude, to the induction of apoptosis, or programmed cell death.”

“I like the first one better,” Keith says and everyone erupts.

Take four at noon, eat forty minutes later for full effect with no nausea. Wait seven hours, take four, eat forty minutes later. Good chance to re-up without getting sick. Seven hours. Two am, four pills, food forty later. Go to sleep in a couple hours and wake up really, really groggy. Do best to wake up fully by twelve.

“Alright guys, I’ll be right back," and I head down the hallway to the teacher’s restroom, where I take four at noon.

Withdrawn

Gala says, “Are you alright?”

“Perfect. Better than perfect. Why?”

There’s nothing anywhere. No one has or no one’s answering. All I want is to overdo something. I want to ignore the directions, take too much, quadruple the dosage. I want to be unfit to operate vehicles and heavy machinery. I want marked drowsiness to occur.

Running out is desperate stares. I take the last few and wait for the signs. Go through the day until it hits- a stomach cramp and a few beads of sweat. The next few days, it’s like the flu but worse, one that’s my own fault. It's three days of chaotic temperatures and phone calls and toilets, three nights of writhing and not sleeping.

The only defense is to fill myself with any substitute I can find. Alcohol, cold medicine, sleep aids, muscle-relaxers, herbs. I search methodically through medicine cabinets for stickers: Controlled Substance. Keep out of reach of children. Do not stop taking suddenly. Do not combine with alcohol and/or other sedatives. Giant dares every one of them. When it's bad enough, the warnings become the directions.

“Jesus, John, you’ve been living in the bathroom tonight.”

“It’s my stomach, I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that.”

I want to sleep until the assault stops, skip the attack on my senses. Everything feels wrong, smells bad, tastes strange. Colors are off. It’s the world but worse. And the chills, they never, ever stop.

“So what do you want to do tonight, love?”

“I really don’t think I’m up for going out, I’m sorry.”

And then, after a few days, it lifts. It’s all gone, fresh, finally clear and it seems all right and happy and over, that whole episode of mistakes and compromise. Out, proud, and done. Finally, finally done. I make plans and swear to get that thing done. Swear everything’s changed.

The People, They Talk

My old neighborhood was so much nicer.

“Hey,” a kid yells from his bike.

Last year I got home and kissed Gala. I probably kissed her a couple more times and graded some papers. My father would have called asking my help buying a snow blower or a printer or whatever he had his mind on as my mother told him questions to ask me, then took the phone from him anyway like she always did. And it annoyed me, like it always did.

And I was eating pills in secret.

“Hey, you.”

This year, same day, I have half a wife. She says it’s a temporary separation but I feel like it might not stay that way. That’s what makes me sleep in thirty-minute spurts, my chest and back slimy-cold and still I do nothing. I do what I do: I swallow it. So my car is gone and my job is gone and I’m living on my own, temporarily.

The kid on the bike shouts, “You were on TV!”

I just want people to stop whispering, the people who say I'm guilty and curse my name even though it’s not true and I have no way of proving it.

“You were on the news, right?”

No one believes me all the way through, not even Gala. My half-wife’s voice wavers on the phone just enough so I can hear it. I know her voice like no one else, and it destroys me. It takes me apart, piece-by-piece.

“You’re that guy from the high school. My dad say’s you’re a real piece-a-shit,” and he pedals off.

No one believes me, but I didn’t set it.

Tile and Bile

He says, “Yeah, I fucked her. They found her dad in a hotel.”

Janet checks the TV for the exchange, wants to see how high his baby went. He says, “I’m telling you, babies are the new pork bellies. When the rest of the world catches up you’ll see baby rates in shop windows, like foreign currencies.”

“Like lobsters,” I point, and the newspeople say it's supposed to snow tomorrow.

My feet fill with glass as I make my way to the bathroom, head soaking in gasoline. I can smell my future leaking out my pores. The cold-tile strobing in my eyes. I reach the toilet and puke out a pound of Oreo’s and two fish sticks, the mixture swirling around and swimming lazy like post-coital. The Oreos look stuck back together and my bucket-echo laugh confirms it.

“They found him with his dick out,” Janet says. “Her dad hung himself with his own tie, believe that? My new hero.”

I tidal wave into another go, vomit-spraying poisons in every color, muscles tensed for action. Blood pools in my head and I stare at what I’ve made: pills floating in vodka. The toilet is filled the way I just was; my very own stunt-stomach. I reach in and fish out the pills, waste not want not.

The Great Fire

I’m asleep on Jordan Street when it comes for me, dreaming of an earlier year and putting spit into my pillow. The apartment door goes angry and its shout sends the silverfish scattering to hide under laundry and plastic cups and wrappers.

I try explaining how I'm innocent but it doesn’t care, so I do the next best thing and grab the H for the ride. After all that sitting in Janet’s car earlier today, trying not to buy it, I just came home and fell asleep from my last six pills. I paid for the H, I might as well try the stuff.

Officers are waiting for me in the hallway when the door opens. My hands raise. One of them asks if they need to use handcuffs and I tell them I’m not dangerous.

The shorter one says, “Put your hands down. You’re lucky no one called the media, we’d have to put on a show.”

Down the mildew-steps and out the front we stand at the patrol car, two cops and a criminal watching neighbors go by and opinions under. The night is cold with the wind coming over the snow banks. They tell me to move so I get into the back on my own, behaving, keeping my hands free to work.

The junk digs into the crease of my crotch, a bag and a promise. “According to the news I did. Channel six reported I was having an affair with one of them. Personally, I believe it. I believe everything I see on TV.”

The taller one turns. “My neighbor’s kid was in that class. The attitude drops or you do.” Out the window, my wrinkled landlord is zipping up her coat and not renewing my lease.

“Then don’t ask stupid questions.”

He turns back. I go in, getting the bag out from my pants and opening it and dipping my thumb in and getting the nail full of powder and then up under my nose. I say, “Always the right time to try something new, right guys?”

They both say What? turning around and shouting and going for their handles. I put my fist with the thumb into the open palm of the other and bow my head, and with the second thumb I hold the other nostril closed as they panic-claw their way out of their doors. I tilt my head away long enough to exhale, then bring my nose back to it. And all the sound leaves the world, and I suck in hard, and the white hits tissue and sinks in and they rip doors open and grab at my body from both sides as it goes orgasm, warm like the fire. And that fire, I see it now. It rolls slow over the trees and down the street, tumbling over snow and melting it. I didn't realize I'd see things on H but here it is, this bathing flame. It rolls past doors and cars and telephone lines and landlords and police officers, thrashing them back and flash-burning their clothes off, and the flesh underneath goes bubble-black and pink, scab-gummy as it cooks. The inside of the car fills with flames and the seats erupt beneath me and my head goes back, slow, slow. And the night goes white, and the roaring cuts to silence.

***

When I wake up again I’m walking a street as empty as corpse-veins, my neck rubber-soft. Ashes cushion my steps and again my eyes go dark.

Spaceships Over London

I met her on the Eye.

After college but before a job, I went to Europe. It was my last chance and I knew it so I booked my ticket and bought my pack and filled it with clothes and supplies. I made an itinerary, bought my rail ticket and said my goodbyes and then, like a cough, I was standing in Heathrow Airport still entirely unready.

I was in London, first stop on a two-month journey. I panicked if I focused any further than today, so I found the place where I was staying, unloaded my stuff and headed out. At first it was all looking where I was going, which side was traffic on, which way were people walking- people whose looks were saying: One of these does not belong.

But then as always happens, I fell into it. Just that fast I was in the groove, walking fluid, moving with the tides, finding the city’s timing and making it mine, the synchronicity of everything finding balance in my vitals. And almost the moment that happened, the moment I was feeling really good about myself, the London Eye came into view and then I felt very, very small. I was nothing under this carousel on the water, each compartment a vessel slowly examining London, floating inches at a time, watching, listening, the shapes and angles mathematically flawless and every movement a perfect fraction of time hovering over dark water. Despite the itinerary and the flight hunger and the long line, I drifted toward it and bought a ticket. There was something unknown about it that caught me, and if nothing else that’s what I’d come here to find.

So I waited.

I stood in line and watched tourist after tourist defile what I felt was already mine and if I thought about it too long it enraged me. So I watched the sun and the Parliament building and the nearby Dali statues; tall, distorted things that held their heads up and marched.