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The thing about sleep is that once you stop looking for it, it comes up to get you. Everybody says the same. Stop lying there in bed, all rigid and counting sheep, and think of something else. Think of the list you gotta make tomorrow; eggs, butter, bananas, some of those little cream cakes that are so good with coffee…
Bam. You’re asleep. But for me, it gets a little too literal for comfort.
Sleep finds me wherever it can. Finds me in those moments where it’s the furthest thing from my mind; where I’ve stopped looking for it so hard that I’ve given it no choice but to get me, really. Someone’s house, middle of the day. Dew-wet bench an hour after waking up. A john’s motel room, face smashed into the gross, scratchy bedsheets. I wake in parking lots, on patches of grass, in strangers’ arms, alone on dirty carpets. But you wanna know the real kicker? The one thing that makes this shit so ironic? When I settle myself down in bed at night, sleep’s so far away from me it’s like we’ve never even met.
I stare at the ceiling (cracked, water stained) and listen to a couple guys in the hall outside the apartment (yelling, drunk). Their voices rattling around the narrow hallway, spearing right through the soft, rotting plaster-and-wood of the walls to bury into my skull. So I said, I said, ‘don’t you fuckin’ speak to me like that’, right? And he goes, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ so then I say —
Scott’s not here tonight. I’m finding it hard to sleep. Under the bedsheets my world is just black, but not like when the road comes up and swallows me whole. Not like those few seconds where my mind wakes before my body does. It’s just black. My breath making it stuffy and humid, only the voices are louder if I resurface into the fresh(ish) air of the room so I stay under there. And I screw my eyes shut. I bunch my hands into fists around the bedsheets. I think of roads, I think of cracked asphalt, I think of shimmering heat above the horizon, I think of roadkill and flaking yellow lines and black scars of tires stripping themselves to nothing, and the kid in the hallway is going, I didn’t even know the fucker! But he had my girl on his fuckin’ arm so what was I s’pose to do? So I said — I go —
Daylight. I drink a beer on a bench in some park full of dog shit and cigarette butts. The world is so bright and beautiful I have to keep my sunglasses on to dull it. Later, I’ll panic in an old woman’s bathroom and that strip of Idaho asphalt will rise up to greet me, but I guess I’ll catch a good few z’s.
In my dreams my childhood house crashes into that road over and over, like a tape caught just at the moment of impact, and rewound. I don’t think I need an interpreter to tell me what it means. That I’m gay, right? Ha. Shit. How does that saying go? If you can’t joke about it…
Sometimes I wake with the smell of shattered plasterboard and wood in my nose, no matter where I am. The smell of that grey water that drips from the tangled pipes, jutting from the torn-up base of the house. Making wet, dark spots on the road that dry up as quick as they come. The sunlight is always harsh in my dreams. It’s why I like Portland so much. When the sun comes out its a watery egg behind the clouds nine times outta ten. And that one time? Who knows. I’m probably asleep.
Today the sun is a badly poached egg, and I have a new pack of smokes, and twenty bucks in my pocket. It’s drizzling; a fine grey mist making everything shine slick in the pale light. Later, I’ll spend a buck on miso soup and watch Scott talk about whatever shit he’s into right now; Hamlet, motorcycles, the class indicator that a good coat is. I’ve learned a lot since meeting him, some six months ago, but I still don’t get a lot of what he says sometimes. But it’s fine. I like to watch him more than I like to listen. And I like when the check comes and he takes my buck and slides it back to me. I like how he touches my shoulder. I like how he looks like something out of an old photograph; like someone has cut him out from 1909 and collaged new clothes on him, and pasted him onto the familiar old backdrop of our local Chinese spot. I think that’s why he has a certain shine to him that the streets can’t rub off; the flash of a lightbulb popping, capturing him forever.
If I told him this stuff he’d laugh, but then he’d got thoughtful about it. Scott’s a real thoughtful guy. Me, I’m just trying to get through the day with as little thinking as possible. I guess in that way, he thinks for both of us.
I finish my beer, and sit with the empty can until my hand grows too cold around it. Maybe I drift off. Maybe I don’t. That’s one thing you learn pretty early-on as a narcoleptic; the waking world and the dream world are far too close for comfort.
———
“A man cannot live on miso alone,” Scott says, in that fake grand voice he puts on when he’s trying to be funny. I peer at him from over the edge of the bowl, the steam rising from the soup making him all indistinct and ghostly.
Are you a vampire? I wanna ask. Are you one hundred years old?
I’ve seen his reflection, though. We share a john that likes seeing him inside me through the mirror. So, no to the vampirism. Still, there’s something to him.
“You want something else?” he asks, coffee cup hanging from his fingers in that effortless, effete way he has. Loose cuff of his flannel open and flopped back from his wrist, exposing the blue veins there to the humid, fragrant air of the restaurant.
Mutely, I shake my head. The steam from the soup is making my upper lip wet. “I’m not that hungry,” I murmur, and Scott’s eyes flick away to the rainy street outside.
“Suit yourself,” he says, and takes a gulp of his coffee. The bracelet on his wrist catches the lights overhead; I watch them slide red in the metal.
I’m in love with Scott because anybody with half a mind would be. Because we fuck sometimes and it’s the only time sex feels good. Because sometimes when I wake I find his coat draped over me, or I find myself draped over his lap. Because he touches me with gentle intention, in a world that seems set to have me touched in ways that leave my skin crawling. I’m in love with Scott because he’ll never love me.
“Mikey,” he says, because Scott could hold a conversation with a blank wall, “That guy with the camera got in touch. Wants to shoot a few Polaroids, and then,” he makes air quotes, “‘See where things go.’”
I sniff. “Oh yeah?”
He grins at me, red light in his teeth. “So you’re in? We can split the money.”
I don’t know how to tell him that I’d do that shit for free, if it was with him. Fold myself into any embarrassing shape that weirdo wants; do anything, eat anything, fuck anything. But it’s not the kinda thing you can say. As long as we’re both motivated by money, anything goes. So I just say, “Count me in,” and fish a chunk of tofu from the soup with my fingers.
Scott’s voice is pleased when he replies. “Consider yourself counted.”
—————
Scott likes to say that if whoring yourself out to women got you the money that whoring yourself out to men does, he’d never see another dick again in his life. In my experience, women like to fuck just as much as men do, and would pay more for a guy like Scott. So either he knows this and ignores it, or he doesn’t know it and I should tell him, right?
But what if he’s ignoring it? The question plays loops around my head in the small hours of the morning, where I’m begging sleep to come find me. But I’ve never been good at playing hard to get. It’s what Scott would call ‘a fatal flaw’.
His fatal flaw would be pretending he doesn’t get hard when he’s in my mouth. Or something along those lines. Shit, I don’t know what to think any more. We have that date with the German guy who likes to take pictures of our assholes, or whatever, and afterwards we eat donuts at the twenty-four hour spot near where we’re staying lately. And Scott says something like, did you think your twenties would look like this? And I say something back like, I didn’t think my twenties would look like anything.
Back in Idaho I used to burn ants with the light concentrated through a magnifying glass. I got taught my alphabet and my numbers sat with my elbows on the sticky lino tablecloth in the dining room. I used to sit on the porch and watch storms blow in; bruised purple clouds clumping up on the horizon, like when you pull the plug on a soapy sink, and some clings to the enamel.
I feel like I’m circling the drain. When I ask Scott, he says he got washed down years ago. Then he lights a cigarette, and we get kicked out, and between the donut spot and our squat I get eaten up by asphalt and watch my childhood home crash to nothing over and over again.
Damp smell in my nose. Am I having mini-strokes? I got my narcolepsy diagnosis from a med student I blew two months ago. It’s safe to say his mind was elsewhere when he mentioned it. But then the damp smell resolves itself as wet ground, as Portland, as Scott’s rain-damp coat. I can still taste the glazed donut I ate, stuck in my molars, right there with the coppery metallic panic taste on my tongue.
“If you keep doing that, I’m gonna have to start carrying ‘round a dolly to cart your ass home on,” Scott says, his voice low and dolorous.
I blink up at the buzzing streetlamp above us, at the bugs flitting against its bulb. Behind it, the night sky is a featureless black mass. “Am I awake?” I croak. Scott’s hand is warm, resting on my cheek.
He huffs. “Yeah,” he says, and pats at my face. “You’re awake, Mike.”
The med student said, stress can trigger it. And then, with me on my knees in the dirty motel carpet, he asked, would you say you experience a lot of stress on a daily basis?
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, shaking my head to clear it as I sit up, and Scott’s arms fall away. “I’m sorry, I haven’t been sleeping, it gets worse —”
“It’s okay,” he says, quietly, and touches the nape of my neck with his warm hand. My hands, they’re freezing, shuddering, scuffed at the base of my palms from falling. Scott’s gotten real good at catching me, like he has a sixth sense for when I’m gonna have an episode. My throat still hurts from how deep he’d put those warm fingers down it earlier. How can you be just friends with someone who’s done that to you?
He offers me a hand up, and ends up hauling me halfway to standing when my knees decide they don’t wanna play along half way through. It makes him laugh a little, which makes me laugh too, despite everything.
He does a lot for me. I’m not sure he even knows how much. I’m afraid to let it slip, in case he realises he doesn’t have to be doing any of it, and ditches me. No more watching him drink cup after cup of coffee in our Chinese spot. No more knowing that at least one person in the world has an eye out for me. No more infrequent fucks where we both pretend we don’t enjoy it as much as we do. Those are important. Helps me remember I’m not so numb and closed-off as I feel. Helps me remember that there are some things in this world that can feel good.
Back at the squat, I watch Scott undress, I watch him brush his teeth in the kitchen sink; the only one with running water. We’ve got damp wallpaper, rats, windows that let in every draft Portland thinks to throw at us. But we’ve also got each other. I’m sure at some point in the future there’ll be a trade off; Scott in return for warmth and security, or for pleasure and happiness.
Thing is, I’m not sure I’d give him up. Thing is, I’m not sure if he’d do the same for me.
“Are you cold?” he asks, as he passes behind me. The squat is a dim, low-ceilinged single; no furniture but the kitchen unit, a sagging old sofa, and a mattress on pallets we both share. Scott keeps telling me it’s temporary. I keep wondering whether the next place will be better or worse.
I hunch my shoulders inside my coat. “Yeah.” Blink stars from my eyes. Blink them away again. I’m standing in the doorway like a zombie, shivering. The road is threatening me. Undulating in front of my eyes, like the biggest, baddest asphalt snake you’ve ever seen. The thing about sleep is the minute you stop looking for it, it comes. So I’m keeping it dead in my sights, chanting over and over again; I see you. I’m watching you. I’m looking for you.
What comes isn’t real sleep; it’s like a mockery of it. I call it un-pure sleep; un-pure like the grey slush that gathers in the gutter in the winter. Like dirty dishwater, wet things floating in it. Like me right now. Tainted, sullied, dirtied. Still, Scott fucks me. What does it mean?
I like to collage together ideas and images and events; like the collaged-together figure of Scott. Like to lay them out, and look at them, and realise I can’t glean a single fucking thing from them. Am I too close to have perspective? Will I one day grow older than my twenty-three years, and look back and go, oh, it was right in front of me all along? Or do they just not connect? I can’t think with the road in the corner of my vision. I can smell the heat of the sun bouncing off the asphalt; bubbling the paint on my soon-to-be-destroyed home. My only constant. One day, I might wake up on it.
Scott says, “You wanna sleep in my bed tonight?”
Scott says, “C’mere, it’s too cold to sleep alone.”
Scott says, “Brush your teeth.”
I love him the way you love a cat that refuses to look at you. Because you know when it happens, it’ll be incredible. Just the best feeling in the world. All those months of that cat ignoring you and playing cool will suddenly be worth it, because now it’s purring, and rubbing its round head against your shin, and it wants you. That’s how I love Scott.
—————
In the mornings, we play a game of cat and mouse in the pink-lit world beneath the bedsheets.
Scott’s always awake before me, but he pretends he’s not every single time. As if his fake deep breathing could convince me that I hadn’t felt his eyes on the side of my face not five minutes ago. But then it’s my turn to look at him. To study his dark eyelashes, the elegant sweep of his cheekbones, the haughty, sulky set to his wide mouth. Stubble black on his jaw, just like the black hair on his chest, under his arms, between his legs. I think I know him better than I know my own reflection. I wonder if he knows me the same.
Some unknown period of time later, Scott will make a big show of waking up, and I’ll have to look away. It’s a game of chicken that neither of us are winning.
“We should buy food with the money from last night,” he says, as I scrub at my face and neck over the kitchen sink. The apartment has a particular sense of dampness today that means it’s raining, or that it’s soon to be raining. The windows are boarded over. I won’t know until Scott and I step out into the day.
“We could,” I say, wiping at my wet face with the hem of my t-shirt. “Or we could buy beer, coke, whatever.”
“Coke,” Scott parrots, and laughs. When I look over to him, he has his eye to the gap in the boards over the windows, watching the world go by.
“Is it raining?” I ask him.
Scott says, “We’re not buying coke, Mikey.”
It’s raining outside, which I’m glad for. God could never burn me like an ant with this Portland poached egg sun. It means Scott’s hair gets a little curly at the ends in the drizzle. It means everything smells new and fresh. It means the paper labels on the cans of soup we buy get wet and mushy, and slide off like dead skin as I unload them into the cupboards on our return home.
Scott splits soon after. I don’t know what he does but it must be something important, because sometimes I don’t see him for days on end. Me, I make our bed. I heat up some soup and I eat it. I smoke a couple cigarettes and pace from one end of the apartment to the other, spongy grey carpet under my socked feet. I’m tired. I’m unhappy. I’m restless.
Across town lives a guy named Mick that I buy coke from. Fifty bucks a gram, so you know it’s mostly Drain-O. I take five crumpled bills from mine and Scott’s meagre stash and try to tell myself that I’ll make it back once I’m high. I get real productive on coke, even if I can’t get my dick hard.
On rainy days I like to pace around the city in a t-shirt. I like feeling the rain on my bare skin, raising it up in goose pimples until I feel all tight and awake and shivery all over. My socks wet from the rain working its way up through the cracks in my boots, the soles flexing away from the leather with every dogged step forward. Sometimes I feel like I’m on a constant and relentless binge of anything that’ll keep me alert and upright for as long as possible. One day scientists will work out how to remove the part of your brain that makes you sleep, and I’ll be free. I’ll have control again. But for now I make do with cold days, and coffee, and cocaine.
Mick’s place is on the top of a crumbling old downtown walk-up; eight floors to heave myself up, and then eight floors to rattle down once I’ve gotten a bump of something to make my head feel set to twist clean off my shoulders. It’s ten a.m. He opens the door to me wearing nothing but a pair of boxers, patterned all over with Charlie Brown’s face.
“Mikey Waters,” he says. A spatula drips half-liquid curds of half-scrambled eggs onto the threshold. “I heard you’d moved away.”
I stuff my hands into the pockets of my wet jeans, and duck my head, eyes on the eggs on the wooden floor. The hall smells like bacon and mildew. “Still here,” I mutter, and rock backwards on my heels.
“Yeah,” Mick mutters, sardonic. More egg joins the floor. “Looks like it.”
Then he steps back, and I step forward, and I wonder if somewhere across town Scott has just gotten real annoyed at me for some reason he can’t put a finger on.
“How long’s it been?” Mick asks, as I trail him through the shadowy, cramped hall that joins his apartment to the hallway. There’s a tattoo on his back I’ve never seen before; a distorted clown’s face with dripping, drooling fangs. It shifts when he moves his arm; shoulder blade moving under the skin and making that clown leer at me.
“Months,” I say, to the tattoo.
When I was seventeen I used to put cigarettes out on my ankles. But there’s a fine line with waking yourself up, and startling yourself so hard it sends you over the hill and down the other side. Coke started making me pass out. I stopped for a little while, and got a little richer but mostly a lot more bored.
Mick throws the spatula in the sink.
I say, “Finish breakfast, man.”
He says, “You still see that Favor kid?”
I think of the hair on Scott’s belly, the way it starts and stops on either side of the dark scar that splits him from belly button to sternum. I think of my nose in that hair. I think of playing chicken with him under the covers. “Yeah,” I croak. “He’s around.”
Mick disappears into his bedroom. I sit myself on the sofa and watch the TV that’s playing there on mute. Cartoons become more frenetic without any music or nothing to ground them. Starts stressing me out, watching Jerry bonking Tom on the head in pure silence and running around him in a blur. So much so that I start clutching my fists in the knees of my pants, and then I have to stand and walk to the window, watch the rain until my head cools down.
The soundless crash of my house into that shimmering, simmering strip of Idaho road. Maybe if I just nudged the TV dial up, I’d get to hear it. Tom and Jerry chase music as it folds into itself on impact.
“Nice view, huh?” Mick says, when he returns.
I blink out onto the solid concrete wall that stands a few feet away; spiderwebbed with mossy cracks. If I look down, I can see the alley all those floors below. It gives the room a dim, shuttered-in feeling; the kind of damp, inside darkness that comes with heavy heavy rain. “Sure,” I mutter. “Real nice.”
My head still feels hot. Stepping out into the rain is a relief; fifty bucks poorer, gram of coke richer. The rain there like a cool touch to soothe my brow. Cool like the back of your mom’s hand, like — hell if I know. Like rain.
Coke gives me a drip down the back of my throat like nothing else. I sniff my way around the streets for a while, my nose numb and rubbery and all my limbs feeling like they’re being piloted by somebody else. Like my legs are a oval-shaped blur just like in the silent cartoon that had freaked me out so bad at Mick’s. My head pounding and pounding and pounding away, that sinus-headache pain that Mick’s shitty coke always gives me.
I know what Scott would say. Then don’t fucking take it, Mike. But he’s off doing whatever Scott Favor does when he’s not twisting my head around, so I’ve got no voice of reason. Besides, it feels good. Feels like I’m ten feet tall, feels like I could never fall asleep again in my life.
My cartoon feet take me to Chinatown, where I smear myself across the glass of mine and Scott’s usual haunt just to see if he’s there. Clenching my jaw, eyes bouncing around in my head like super balls. But he’s not, and not even the rain is enough to cool me off anymore so I take myself off to 162nd street, where I hang around outside of the porno shop there and bum a few smokes to race my way through. Pacing that strip of sidewalk, knowing that I look wild but not able to do a thing about it.
Everything gets super clarified when I’m high. Like I can take in every little detail of the world around me without having to think. I can smell the rain and the dirty gutters and my cigarette smoke; the dirty hair of the john who leans across the front seat to open the passenger door for me. Crackly pulsing music from the stereo, cracked old leather under my ass that creaks when it’s my turn to lean across into him. He paws at the front of my pants as I suck him off, his dick pulled through his open fly and his other hand tangled in my hair, pressing me down. I’m not hard. He doesn’t seem to care. He cums in my mouth and I spit it onto the floor between his shoes on reflex, and then he’s cussing at me and shoving money into my chest and telling me to get the fuck out.
I get the fuck out. Then I get the fuck into somebody else’s car. Then I get the fuck outta that one, and I do it a couple more times until my head is pounding so bad I can barely keep my eyes open. Stomach roiling hard, until I spit up that morning’s breakfast into the gutter and decide I’ve had enough.
The thought of doing drugs is always better than the doing of it. There’s lots of things like that. Alcohol. Food. Sex. Doesn’t stop people getting addicted, though.
My nose is running into my throat. I spit into the drain, watch the dirty runoff from the wet roads wash what little I’d had in my stomach away.
“Hey!” A stranger’s voice. “You okay?”
I unstick a hand from its clutch on my knee to wave it over my shoulder. Words can’t make it up past the lump in my throat.
————
I’m having a bad day, I think, as I stare off across the park. There’s a bunch of kids messing around in the play area, seemingly unbothered by the day’s relentless drizzle. I stare at them, and smoke my cigarette, and amend, I’m having a bad year.
Doing coke in the middle of the day is one of the things you can never come to regret fully until it’s the middle of the afternoon, the sun is up, and you’re coming down off it. I’m sitting here like an asshole wearing sunglasses in the rain. My ass all wet from the grass underneath me, my skin crawling like there’s ants fighting their way through me.
The kids are laughing. That screechy, carrying laugh that kids have. Me, I’m thinking about taking a little more coke just to stop feeling like complete dog shit. I’m thinking about Mick’s clown tattoo. I’m thinking about how he asked after Scott which is making me think about Scott going to Mick’s place and seeing his tattoo and his TV and his alleyway view through his window.
Then I’m thinking about Scott. About Scott of this morning. Scott of last night. Beside me, inside of me, pulling me up from the ground. I’m not normally the sort of person to mope, I promise. The coke is making me depressed. It’s making me — it’s making me fucking anxious. Chewing the inside of my mouth bloody. My thoughts aren’t even words anymore, just pictures. Just: Mick’s tattoo, the egg curds on the floor, my vomit in the gutter, Scott smiling at me under the bedsheets —
Idaho road, coming up to smack me in the face so hard I smell my cheek starting to burn and sizzle. Same smell as the bacon that had been going slow in the pan while Mick bagged me up a little Drain-O with a pinch of cocaine. I can see that drooling clown leering at me through the windows of my house, crumpled and lopsided and melting into the asphalt. Undulating like the sea, like a snake, like my unhappy stomach.
When I got sick as a kid my mom would feed me Alka-Seltzer and plain toast, and lie my head on her lap and rub my belly for me. At least, I think so. Fuck. It’s hard to tell dreams from reality when you spend your time with your head in some picture-reel of things; things that made you feel a certain way that you know you’ll never feel again. That lino tablecloth your elbows would get stuck to on hot days. Mouthing A, B, C… and thinking about what Mom was gonna serve for lunch. But if my childhood was so idyllic I wouldn’t be like this, would I?
I’m crushed to bits along with that house in my dreams. Shattered onto that strip of road in Idaho. When I come to my cigarette has crumbled to wet ash on my t-shirt, the sky a steel grey expanse above me. Shivering. My brother used to tell me this story about a woman who fell asleep in the rain and drowned. Me, I’m just glad I sleep with my mouth shut.
I right myself. Every inch of my body covered in goose pimples, my teeth chattering together so hard it’s like they’re gonna break. The play park is empty; the kids gone home. The sky holds that certain quality of light that late afternoon on a rainy day has. Cold, and deep grey, everything grainy and indistinct.
I cover my left eye over with my hand, and see roads spread out like spidery veins in the back of my eyeball.
————
I get real sick after that day spent wandering around in the rain. That kinda sick where you just lie in bed and shiver and sweat and wish you were dead. Watching the pinprick of light that comes through the crack in the boards creep across the floor. Wondering who will find my body if I die here and Scott never comes back.
I get real into imagining it. Seems to be all my pulsing, feverish brain is good for, when its quit making me hallucinate. I imagine the stain I’ll leave on the mattress; bigger than my own skinny, underfed body. I imagine how it’ll be to die; whether I’ll know it or whether it’ll surprise me in the very last second. I figure it’ll be a lot like passing out. I figure I’ll end up in purgatory, wandering endless roads for eternity.
My body swelling up, my body bursting, my body shrinking. Sometimes as I lie there in my haze, I get half-convinced I can feel it happening already. The beat of my heart in the roof of my mouth. The hard pulse of my blood in my fingers and toes, making them feel swollen and huge, even though they look normal when I lift them to my eyes to see.
I think I’ll come apart easily. I’ve always felt split down the middle, sewed together wrong. Like nothing in me is in the same place it is in normal people’s bodies. My heart beats in my stomach. My brain lives in my dick. There’s a whistling cavern in the middle of me, full of all the grit and cigarette butts that blow up against my feet while I’m pounding the sidewalk. I can feel it when I breathe. I can feel it when I heave myself up to gulp down water, to puke it back up into the sink.
My head feels like a hot balloon, with two burning red coals for eyes. My throat the size of a straw, my tongue like a huge swollen old sponge. I’m an abstraction, made up of tossed-away things, foraged from the garbage and made human in Scott’s bed.
Then, he comes home. Scott. I don’t know how long it’s been but I know that it’s raining outside, because the air in the room is damp. Scott, he’s blinking at me from the doorway as he tugs at his laces, his mouth opening and closing.
“What?” I mumble, propping myself up on one elbow to squint at him. My head swims with the effort. “Scott? Are you really here?”
Scott’s voice sounds as if it’s coming from very far away. That low, even tone of speaking he has. “Mikey, what did you do?”
I ask, “Am I dreaming?”
He says, “Mike, are you sick?”
We stare at each other. And I decide I can’t be dreaming, because I don’t think I could ever conjure up something like Scott. He’s got an almost unnatural solidness to him; like he’s more real than me, more real than the furniture, than other people, than the roof over our heads. Now, to my swelling, melting, feverish brain, he seems to pulse with it.
Scott touches the back of his hand to my forehead. His cool skin. I can only look at him from under my lashes; only in small doses. He has a presence that overwhelms. Half-fondly, he mutters, “Can’t leave you alone for a second, huh?”
I close my eyes. My heart throbs; bursting-body throb. Infected, spidery red veins around a wound throb.
Scott’s gentle when he wants to be. The kinda gentle that comes natural; doesn’t need to be forced. It tells of pampered childhood illnesses, the world brought to him on tea trays and swimming inside plasticky medicine bottles. Me, I’ve just got my memories of Alka-Seltzer, the memories that might not even be real.
“Here, Mike.” Water glass held to my mouth, Scott’s hand between my shoulder blades to help me sit. Warm and broad and dependable. He doesn’t ask where I’ve been. I don’t ask where he was. That’s just how we are. I think honestly, part of him doesn’t care.
He makes me sip at water. I don’t throw it back up. Then Gatorade, and then soup. And the more I keep down, the more like myself I feel; the more Scott pokes at me to eat, to drink, to move around.
“Christ,” he keeps saying. “The things I do for you.”
Yeah, I wanna say. And the things I do for you.
He washes my hair over the sink. Me, clutching a towel around my bare shoulders, eyes screwed shut at the rush of cold soapy water over my face. Scott, scrubbing at my scalp with his fingertips, the cuffs he wears around his wrists rattling with the movement. Tea tree scented shampoo, making my scalp tingle and my eyes burn when I get a little in by accident. The counter is a hard cold slice against my chest.
I love you, I think, when he wipes suds from my forehead before they slip into my eyes. I love you, when he pulls the towel up from my shoulders to capture my long, dripping hair with it, and begins to roughly towel it dry.
“There you go,” he says, when he releases me. Grinning at me, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows and the front of his sweater wet. “Feel better?”
It’s a loaded question. One that stresses me out the longer I linger over it. Because I know what the right answer is. Yes, so much better thanks to you, Scotty. He gets a kick out of playing hero with me. He thinks I don’t notice but I do. Our back-and-forth has so many layers I don’t think we even know where we started. When he plucked me outta some gutter to come stay with him in the squat before this? That place was full of bird shit and other guys, the sorta spot where you used your bag with all your belongings as a pillow to spare it being stolen. Or was it before that, the first night I met Scott Favor; drinking in some hole over on 162nd, where a finger poked me in the back of the head, and a low, measured voice had asked to bum a smoke.
Jesus, talk about a domino effect. Scott’s still waiting on my reply; half turned away, rising the sink out, but his eyes are settled on me.
I blink wet hair out of my eyes, and say, “Scott, I’m scared of where I’m gonna pass out next.” You know how that road stalks me. You know it gets me when I’m not expecting it.
But Scott just huffs, hand urging the clinging suds of shampoo into the dark eye of the plug hole, as he replies, “Don’t worry, Mikey.” A beat of silence, just the sound of the faucet running into the steel basin of the sink. I watch his profile, his long black eyelashes, the twist to his mouth as he adds, softly, “I’ll always turn up when you need me.”
I can see it for the affectionate nudge that it is. There’s a lot of things that Scott can’t say, or won’t say; not to me, not to himself. And so we circle the drain. All roads lead somewhere.
I guess it’s inevitable that I’ll wake up on the right one in the end.