The
Next Worst Thing
That
night Rebecca looked paler than usual when I stopped at
their place after work. It was on my way home from the
bus stop, and in the year since I’d flunked out
of college, I often dropped by there to see what was up.
Tonight, sure enough, things were happening. Dustin had
finished his first batch of “absinthe,” at
which he’d been tinkering for months. He went to
the kitchen and brought out three glasses, then set them
down close to the lamp. I don’t know if that stuff
was real absinthe. It was already cloudy—so viscous
it seemed it might shatter—and swam with some string-like
particulate bodies that looked like green worms in the
light.
“I’m not drinking
that shit,” Rebecca said when Dustin reached her
the glass. Then I knew something was wrong. This was a
girl who’d spent months as a zombie on Zoloft—“legal,”
and prescribed by her latest psychiatrist, but the worst
shit, gram for gram, she ever took.
“Why are you taking
those?” I’d asked her at the time.
She’d shrugged then—her
most frequent gesture. “Because I tried, but couldn’t
sell them.”
“Yeah,” I’d
said, “but why are you taking them?”
Another shrug. “I
guess ‘cause they’re drugs. And they’re
free.”
I took the first sip. This,
I guess, was one of the things Dustin thought I was good
for. Product testing, and similar functions. One reason
he kept me around. While I raised my glass, Dustin watched,
holding his own in his left hand. He was grinning, and
laughed when I choked.
“I think you got it
right,” I said. “It’s supposed to be
bitter.”
“Ha ha,” he
said. Then he sipped it, and coughed.
It took us some time, but
we finished our glasses. Dustin brought in some packets
of sugar from the kitchen, and we kept spooning in sugar
while we drank. That stuff really cleared out our heads.
It was like being drunk, only minus the pleasure. It was
only the dumb part of drunk.
When he was done, Dustin
probed with his spoon for the settled-out sugar, then
let the spoon clatter to rest in his glass.
“Don’t worry,”
he said then. “There’s more.”
He got up and went to the bedroom.
Now, I could stare at Rebecca. She didn’t seem to
notice or mind. As usual, she had her hair up in pigtails,
and she wore clothes that her parents still bought her,
some jeans and a button-up top. It was only her skin,
really, that got me to worrying. It looked patchy and
gray and unnatural, as if someone had whited her out.
Dustin returned with some
coke in a Ziploc and scraped out some lines at his desk.
Then he dispensed us three straws—one for him, one
for me, one for Becky. This time, she didn’t say
no.
“Anything wrong today?”
I asked once we’d finished the first round.
Becky had done her two lines, but they hadn’t done
much for her slouch.
“You know that we
had the abortion.”
“That’s right,”
I said. I’d known, and not wanted to know, and forgot.
“So how was it?”
Becky shrugged, closed her hands on her lap.
“It’s weird,”
she said. “You know. When they suck out the life.”
I nodded, but didn’t really know.
We did three more rounds, by which time the Ziploc was
empty. Then we sat and waited and worried while the high
tapered into the crash.
“Wanna take a walk?”
Dustin asked me eventually. He was looking up, from the
light on his desk, to the dark in the corners. “It’s
best if we don’t let it catch us in here.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I feel like I need to get out of here.” I
meant less the room than my skull.
Outside, the damp air refreshed us. It was fall. There
were gingko fruits everywhere. Their mush clogged our
treads while we walked.
“She almost died today,”
Dustin said then. “She,” between us, was Rebecca.
“No shit?” I
half asked and half said.
“No shit,” Dustin
answered. “And it wasn’t even really my fault.
At the clinic, she was already bleeding, but they said
not to worry. So we stopped and we bought her some Kotex.
Then we went home and did drugs. We were happy, and thought
it was over. But Becky kept wandering off to the john.
I guess she kept filling up Kotex. There were ten in the
pack, and the next thing you know they’re all gone.
I’m fucked up, and I don’t notice anything
till she’s standing there, shoving Charmin down
her panties, telling me to call 911.”
He looked to make sure that
I got his predicament. You call 911, and then the whole
world’s upon you. You don’t know who’s
coming—ambulance, fire, or cops.
“So what did you do?”
I asked. We were nearing the end of the buildings, where
the city gave way to the shore.
“I did the next worst
thing,” he said. “I called her parents. They
drove us.” He took on a look of pure wonderment.
“You should have seen all the blood in their car.”
“She’s alright
now, though,” I stated. We were crossing the bridge
to the park.
Dustin smiled—not without condescension. He knew,
probably, I had a crush on Rebecca, but it didn’t
really bother him. It wasn’t ever going to be my
child she’d have to abort.
“Sure,” he said.
“They’d severed an artery. Up in her cervix,
or whatever you call it. It’s alright, though. They
stitched her back up.”
I nodded. We walked through the park. The wind got noisy
this close to the water, and anyway, we felt too much
like shit now to talk. I thought I knew, though, what
Dustin thought I was thinking. How Rebecca’d do
better with me, or something like that. In fact, though,
I wasn’t that dumb. I knew there was this—or
my empty apartment, and that that was the worst thing
of all.
.
