I couldn’t remain sober any longer. I couldn’t go another day without sleep, and yet, I had. Over and over my insomnia had become the firebrand not talking, but orating, with a sweeping baritone melody, to my consciousness and convincing it to go along laughingly — a corrupt politician with a sadistic agenda. There weren’t shadows anymore. There wasn’t grey or gloom. Just the burning bright of the winter sun. And at night, the rapid - ejection orb streaks of painfully sparkling red dots held me just out of it’s grasp, tauntingly, holding the head of my doze under water, thrusting it back out just long enough to gasp, and submerging it again. Looking up, - up, at me with doe eyes, silently pleading.
Acute withdrawal is a railroad tie attached to nylon rope that not only pains inconceivably to carry but gratingly mocks you with its toneless, discordant scraping along the asphalt, decrying dignity, or whatever scraps of it are even left. People not as lustily jubilant as they are in summer, they still retained an inner magic as they passed me down the street chattering with friends. The magic of decency and control. People without a care, despite having everything to lose.
I didn’t even ask what it was because I didn’t care. Hadn’t spoken to the guy in two years. I just needed it, and I was sure it was opiate - based/extracted, whatever it was he was peddling. Fuck it. Hand me a dead and decomposing rat and sprinkle the shit in its stinking fur and let me lick. Just before I vomit from the soggy, mold encrusted rag taste of spoiled milk, the dope cools me. I’m so grateful, I kiss the rat gently. Then a little more passionately. Then I suck its head because I absolutely have lost all sense of purpose and control of will that all of my actions are aimless whims without the slightest of inquiry. Contemplation is dead when you’re off.
I copped them — bags. Heroin. I’d never used it before. Only pills. One day I got home from work. It was November, and the sun was already gone from the sky. It was 5pm. My wife would be home at six, and want us to do things, go out, or basically anything other than sitting the couch doubled over miserably, something which the insomnia had made almost puritanical for me. It even had a pathetic dip in it where my butt was always planted. I couldn’t hack it the rest of the night; the scolding cut of a purposeless world, so I tore opened a bag, thinking about my eight months of sobriety, scoffed impudently in its face, and then horned it.
Everything around me had begun to fall, and for the first time in three quarters of a year, the gloriously glum inking of shadows had descended from space, through my ceilings, and matched themselves up against each one’s true and proper object, finally stretching out their legs and even tangibly yawning, relieved to have returned from the cramped cosmic caskets they been twisted inside of for so long. An inaudible thank you expelled from them with formless motion, not so much as seen or heard, and not really even felt, but imbued with something intrinsically bereft of clarity, yet clearer than the light of any day.
I sat back nodding and drifting down through a soothing river of serenity so far from my reach of experience that, despite it not being close to, felt as if it had subsumed me for the very first time all over again. I just stared down blankly at the apothem of lines of brown power with a smirk I could just barely see through the spilled tar of night on the other side of the glass, perking and dipping and contorting in extraneous from, or perhaps as a product of, my utter ambivalence of material control and the unintentional yet necessary letting go of moral scruple. Then I heard the car door slam.
I blew the remainder and was now floating from room to room with my eyes seeming to be drawn shut by chains hooked through a massive caribiner drilled so deeply into an ancient boulder that it had become its inextricable limb, the metal welded shut. I couldn’t control anything. I could hardly control my legs. I flushed and broke into a cold sweat. I clutched my phone, awaiting in those crucial moments her ascendancy from the basement, only to, through one final prying of my eyelids, see that it was a butter tray in my hands.
Bouncing around my cerebral playground like a mocking basketball with it’s tongue flapping at me was an idea I swiped for over and over in a bubbling rage, wanting to curse it up and down but too high to latch to the snow drift of necessary words. Every thought had become a swimming, floating entity inside a chasm of darkness, but it was darkness, and in darkness is always comfort. Hiding. Always dripping inward. Her steps coursed the wood staircase. Creeeeaaakkk creeeeaaakkk…. Where was I? What is my purpose? Do I have one? Need one?
One thought had fortified itself vividly, but it wasn’t anything I could see or which could transpose itself visually. Only conceptually with an aphantasiac absolution and purity — all of my friends were crowded and crammed into a meager cavity of bleachers, and standing across from them on an ivory podium was Charles Foster Kane, bespectacled with his monocle and top hat, face etched with an unrepentant smirk, hands waving down the clapping, stomping crowd and compelling them to sit, and when they continued to roar, he guffawed heartily with a frighteningly adept air of command.
He perked one of his eyebrows and creased his forehead, slipping a cloth handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiping the sweat away. My back trickled. And once more he raised his hands, and almost by divination, their heads and bodies sunk in tandem with his sluggish, flagging arms and cocksure, smug countenance. The crowd reduced to a moment of sinking murmurs followed by a silence devoid of filter that was thorough and complete. I watched vicariously into a dark closet where they all existed. Kane cocked his head in my direction. My friends and acquaintances turning along with his lead, glancing at me briefly with terrifying grins and raised brows.
He pointed at me. “Now, my commandeers, look! Look into the face of failure! Absorb the face of indignity!”. Kane straightened his lapel and fondled his brass buttons. Again they turned with the collective, fearsome eye of Moby Dick slunk up through the murky emerald sea, unblinking and drunken with judgement. Their bodies were unclothed now, the bloody inscription of the word SUCCESS carving itself unevenly across their backs one letter at a time by an invisible, serrated shard. And they smiled uncompromisingly as I mouthed the words “give me another ch…ch….chance….please”.
Slow and methodically a massive curtain anchored up and unveiled itself little by little from the floor to a sightless, structureless ceiling with an old photo of my dad in his baseball uniform in black and white, and by the time it stopped the motionless image came alive, as my dad’s blameless eyes fixed themselves on me, closed, and he just shook his head with disappointment. I tried hoisting my arms to reach for him, but he’d turned his back and walked away slumped with his head down, exasperated and full of shame.
“Now behold, this offering to the insatiable sons of man, all of you, my fruitful successors, a heeding against a treacherous landscape of choice — a most vital decision…”. Kane halted and pointed in my direction again, and the sound of a whirring film reel seemed to drop from the sky as the frame went dark, the curtain caught fire, and vanished into a billowing cloud of smoke the scent of my wife’s perfume, the sun suddenly went out, and everything turned black, except for Kane’s eyes which glowed a malevolent green. It was my mother’s voice…
….”I’m not ready, Ron. We’re not ready”. “I know, I know. We should go soon, before it grows”. “Yes. Please. I don’t want it to FEEL like I’m getting rid of anything….”.
I started to wince. Don’t say it. I started to shake. Please don’t say it. I started to cry. No, don’t say it. No, dad. Don’t…say…..
“I spoke to God. It’s for the better. This one’s going to be a loser”. “I know”. “An absolute loser. Scum. Absolute scum…”. “Don’t keep saying it, Ron”. “A LOSER!!!!!”
My dad started to giggle condescendingly, then insidiously, but all I could do was stare hypnotically into Kane’s green, glowing eyes, as they grew…bigger… bigger…. BIGGER……
I opened my eyes as a bit of the ceiling floated off with the peak of my high, and I found myself staring into her eyes. My wife’s eyes, wide and bulging, welling with rage. Welling with disdain and derision. I stood, nodding and waning, trying to hold myself up, trying to, as I was sure, to look sober. And the lights went out. Her eyes glowed green. “It’s over, you fucking…..
The voices of all my friends began to chant — L….
Kane resounded — gimme an O
O….
gimme an S….
S….
gimme an E… gimme an R….
E….R….
Next thing I knew I was in bed, staring up at the helicopter blades. The fan, spinning out of control. I recited a silent prayer, and rolled over to my side. The car door slammed again, the engine sputtered to a pulse, and finally it grew fainter and fainter, before dissipating to silence. As I dozed off peacefully for the first time since the Age Of Enlightenment, I smiled. And as reality drowned and sank down into a cavernous trench at the bottom of a subconscious ocean, I could still hear them laughing. Laughing, mocking, judging. Stoicism flying away on wings of vultures.
I never woke up again. Or so I wished.