awstahl.com

I.

I counted the pulses on her wrist while spotting my watch. This was the third time I’d done so in the last ten minutes. It had spiked somewhere around 200 right after she collapsed. I couldn’t actually count fast enough to tell. She was under the influence of the dystopian trippy result of two boxes of OTC sleeping pills downed with a pint of vodka that could peel paint off a Soviet tank. The last check put it near 120, but now it had slipped to around 30. Her muscles had wobbled as if composed of jelly, interspersed with spastic and trembling motions of the limbs, right before she fell. She had tried to say something, but was incoherent when her tongue could only produce mumbles and garbled pronouncements. Now, laying on the floor, her lips appeared sculpted in a pale blue pucker.

They’ve likely said their last words.

II.

She was a tall brunette, unkempt hair and features similar to a horse, with broad shoulders slouched over a saddlebag belly. Not terribly fat, but without the curves of most women her twenty-something age. Although her choice of clothes did nothing to flatter her shape: natty grey t-shirts slung over average unpropped breasts, and baggy pants with enough extra to stash a bag of potatoes. None of it had been replaced in years.

I know her as my roommate’s ex-girlfriend. They were together when he and I worked in the same office, punching the same clock, pulling the same paycheck. Small as it was I needed couch space and he was kind enough to oblige with a blanket and a word of warning.

Shortly after I’d arrived, she had cheated and gotten kicked out. It was all drama with her, or maybe addiction, or maybe outright emotional ignorance, that led to her flighty and reckless escapades. She had started doing speed with a coffee-shop coworker, then disappeared with him for three days after they were mutuallly terminated. Eventually she’d plied her way back with my friend, promising various sex acts that would make a retired hooker blush.

I guess my friend was into that kind of thing and had taken her back.

III.

When I’d gotten home she asked me for a cigarette in an alert paranoid tone, her eyes glazed and bulging. I figured her for tweaking, so tried to pay her state no mind and didn’t give her one. She trotted from the kitchen to bedroom and back again while I mindlessly got stoned to Jeopardy. Hadn’t noticed she was downing the pills three or four at a time, washing with big gulp pulls straight off the bottle with every trip.

When I stepped onto the balcony on the cell having a smoke I heard her gurgle and told earshot I disagreed with whatever her head was doing.

“What the fuck are you on?”

My roommate was out on his bed, nauseated by the same ham and mayonnaisse sandwich for the eleventh day in a row. He had no notion he was sleeping through her overdose; the pills were for him in the first place. He probably left out an open pack that she found.

Didn’t notice when she stole a cigarette of mine, but saw her return holding grocery store coupons, like one off every seven dollars or some horrible delusion like that, as an offer. Apparently the drugs gave her a sense of guilt, and she could still form words and phrases, so had proferred this strange barter. With minimal exasperation I agreed with a hand wave and a nod, then turned away into my cell.

She lit the wrong end of the cigarette.

IV.

Of course, “normal” didn’t come easy to this couple to begin with, and there was no normal to return to. The apartment stunk of vitriolic statements that would hang in the air for an hour, like the stench of a wound changing its gauze. After airing out the awkward they’d begin the violent make-up sex, and I would have to recuse myself to the bar with the other couch surfers. At least I knew those nights that by the time I got to it I wouldn’t really care that I was sleeping on a couch.

She had always talked of depression and nervous breakdowns, and the breakup had provided the perfect opportunity – I didn’t understand why she hadn’t done it then. After a couple weeks of drunken exile it didn’t sound like a bad idea to me either. A suicide fog had formed in the apartment, with the only community we had being one of shared despair. Words would fall as dust to the floor, questions remained unaswered, indifferences solidified, and not enough confidence to sweep it back up again.

Not much living in this place.

V.

And now, I find myself in a world of wonder; the wasteland of what-ifs. The phone is operable, as are several other means of communication, but… “Does anyone need to know, I mean…”.

I conjure for a moment – death’s possibilities – and what the experience would be to be front row at a fatality, to see the gripping collapse as the deceased comes into focus, the closure of a lifetime of memory, the end of a single-play tape with no rewind.

The third pulse check also reveals an arctic core, and I know she’s not long. She is thoroughly poisoned now, a gloss developing over her thoughts, and the voyeurs want to watch, the vicarious get a taste, the morbid have satisfaction.

She twitches on invisible strings, curled on the floor, eyes rolled, jaw clenched, head tilted, throat taut, mouth foamed, convulsing as the nervous system shuts down.

This is her last success and I am but its audience.