He knew he had already taken more than the prescribed dosage. There really wasn’t anything he could do about it except maybe vomit the small, probably-already-dissolved tablets out of his feeble body. And that would be a waste of money, anyways.
He dragged himself toward the familiar porcelain face of the toilet, contemplating. From somewhere in his bedroom, the muffled soundtrack of the party still played. All the guests had gone, leaving his spacious –his terribly lonely– apartment a mess. Idly, he wondered how long it would take someone to discover his body if he died tonight. And when they did, they could come upon a dreadfully incriminating scene – one still littered with reeking, discarded cigarette butts, empty bottles, and all manners of desensitization.
All the drug fiends and their orange-bottled friends. His bottles lined up like they were waiting in line at a club, some peering around the others while others waited patiently knowing they had very little power or appeal. The ones at the back moved quickly to the front of the line, regardless of their late arrival. He, his body’s bouncer, recognized their presence and they received the automatic, no questions asked, entrance to the bounding base of his insides.
Reeking remnants of a reminiscent screw up.
“Can’t say I didn’t see it coming,” everyone would say. “He was always such a wayward boy. Drinking and drugging from such a young age. Always too moody, unhappy – I mean, you heard the way they found his apartment… but really, so much potential. What a waste.”
For that reason alone, he willed himself to live. To spite the a**holes who thought he had something good in him. As if it hadn’t rotted away along with the façade of a happy, wealthy family. He felt the pleasant promise of sleep setting over him, like a clouded, muggy sunset, but he loathed himself for attempting suicide here, in this place he so reviled…
It wasn’t even an attempt. It was a test of sorts. How could he be so selfish? But then again what did life have to offer. Parents who’d rather spend money on liquor and niceties than a family trip or just a “hi, good morning, how are you feeling today hon?” at the breakfast table. Parties with people who barely knew him. Who grinned with all their Veneers to tell him that they just adored his place and then left all their weaknesses and inadequacies behind as last drops in a Svedka bottle and ashed away Parliaments.
The bathroom door banged open. A girl stood there and stared.
“Ugh, another party to attend. Seriously dude I already have 4 wakes coming up next month, I really don’t think I can afford to pencil yours in to.”
She nudged him over and rested his head on a pile of towels on the bath mat.
Was he really so hated, and pitied, that this was someone’s initial reaction? As much as it filled him with twisted pleasure to spend his last moments with a cynic, her Gallows humor also stung. He tried emanating his disdain for this rude awakening with a glare, but his eyes just seemed to flutter and droop instead.
“I don’t even know you.” He spluttered, for, through all his feelings of loneliness and desperation he still nursed a little bit of his pride. It was all he could get out.
“Join the club,” she snickered through drags of an eCig.
He weakly smirked at the plastic in her hand. She threw it in the waste paper basket. “I only do this to pretend I’m quitting. I know it’s not happening anytime soon because I don’t want to. You can’t give up something you don’t want to get over. I’m supposed to want to stop this and that because it’s unhealthy. That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“I don’t know, I don’t think I would still be here if I figured that one out.” She lifted herself and dusted her knees off in part to get a piece of fuzz off from the bath mat and the other to flatten her pant’s creases. She tried to lift him and smooth his clothing out as well. This perfecting action seemed unnecessary in the darkened light of their predicament, but it was so very necessary to her.
She was staring blankly at herself in the mirror, eyes red and blurry. She started to poke at her eye and for some reason something jolted in him that made him want to stop her. He grabbed her hand a bit too forcefully. She smacked it away with her other, “Calm down, psycho, I’m not trying to scratch my eye balls out; contacts, hello? My eyes get all f***ed up and irritated when I smoke with them in.”
She turned away from the glass reflector. Her face always seemed to be tattooed with a look of disdain— at herself or her surroundings, he’d yet to figure out.
“Come on get up. Let’s go up to the roof.” She started walking towards his balcony and the fire exit. She knew there was always a legitimate entrance from the penthouse, but she preferred the fire escape as her route.
He clumsily slinked after her, more for the pursuit of answers. “So why do you do it?”
She was already up at the top of the world by the time he reached the bottom of the ladder. Her chest and arms hung over the roof’s edge. “I don’t know, the same reason you tried to kill yourself. Or was that just an invincibility test?”
It was a miracle he could loop his foot into the first of the ladders’ steps. Numbness faded over his body. When he reached the top huffing, she was puffing on a cigarette. She offered him one loosely hanging from her pincer grip. She guided in to his mouth and cupped the lighter’s flame around the end of the cancer stick. She was a beautiful haze to him at that point. The glow illuminated the raised white lines perfectly etched into her tanned right arm below her cuffed sleeves. Her skin looked like parchment paper with thin candle wax lines for structure. Even in the dimness of the evening and his brain fog, he could make out dark marks, scribbles, varied scripts smudged on these lines. She caught him staring.
She didn’t wince at all, though. Instead, she exhaled a long plume of smoke and flicked it off the rooftop. She took her long sleeve shirt off. “I’m hot, I hope you can contain yourself.”
She turned over onto her back and pushed her arm forward for him to feel the bumps. “I haven’t decided what I want tatted so I write something down and test it out. When something is there for three plus months I’ll get it inked on. As of yet I think that Chelsea Wolfe quote lasted the longest. It goes something like “You put the pill inside the petal. You put the petal in your mouth. There’s an ocean inside your chest; you bleed the night without a sound.”
He was still fixating on her self-inflicted carvings. She pulled away as goose bumps filled the lowered space on her arm, evening her skin out.
“It only lasted nine days and an evening at Coney Island.”
Her papery skin was always a place to jot down thoughts, in flowery script or staccato uppercase. Anxiety and disillusionment seemed to stir both of their creativities with new “f*** you’s”.
“Whenever I get a disapproving, or concerned, look from a passerby about my etchings I add another line and write something like “happily ever after” above it. Clever, huh?” She shook her head and her dark mane hauntingly streamed around it. The smoke permanently infused into her look, like hair highlights, resembled the steam rising above an empty hot spring.
After a long drawl of silence, he spoke up. “I don’t want to know why and to be honest I don’t really care. But I understand.” Even with all his frustrating effort to form these words, there was a disturbing disconnect between his brain and his mouth’s muscles. It was only a matter of time.
“Hon, I don’t really care if you understand or care. Nor do I care why you were doing what you were doing. I don’t think you would have cared what I had to say either in that moment. You’ll hear what you want to here. We all do. So I’ll ask you now, do you want me to call the ambulance or not?”
He could feel his life swirling in his stomach the way a toilet flushes away waste. His head lolled and lopped in a nod, indiscernibly accepting her help. She gingerly placed her phone between her cheek and shoulder. She didn’t have another hand to hold it with because one hand held his and the other hand was taking the half-smoked, drool-covered cigarette out of his mouth. Before he completely faded out of consciousness, he heard “What is your emergency…”