Heroin

Miles away, M_ woke with a start deep in the night and for one disorienting moment didn’t know where he was.  Pale light from outside backlit curtains unfamiliar to him.  When he squinted into the darkness he was alarmed to find his bedroom door was no longer where it had been for the past sixteen years.  Panicked, M_ fumbled for his lamp on his bedside table, nearly knocking it to the floor in his haste to turn it on, and when he clutched it and thumbed the switch the light flared bright, revealing a room unfamiliar.

They’d moved into the loft apartment above the Laird of McCullough that day.

Relief washed through M_’s body like warm water flowing across parched sand.  M_ exhaled, realizing he’d been holding his breath, then straightened his lamp on the bedside table and turned to see if he’d awakened B_  Her covers were thrown back and she was gone.  At first M_ thought that she had gotten up to use the bathroom, but when he reached out and laid his hand flat on the mattress on her side it was cool and damp.  Since the murders she’d been sweating in her sleep as she tossed and turned, haunted by endless nightmares.  That the mattress was cool meant she’d gotten out of bed some time ago.  Worried, M_ rose and padded out of the bedroom, softly calling her name.

There was no sign of her in the apartment, M_ even checked the kitchen walk-in pantry and the small empty bedroom that would one day be a nursery.  M_ opened the door and walked downstairs into the dim honky-tonk, lit only by the small neon signs over the bar advertising beer brands, the ever changing colours of the Wurlitzer, and the glowing red EXIT signs over each door.

“B_?” M_ stage-whispered into the bar, and received only silence in return.  Since D_ and T_’s murders, B_’s night terrors had grown increasingly worse, and for one soul-chilling moment, M_wondered if she’s added sleepwalking to her nightly disturbances, envisioning her wandering outside, barefooted in her nightgown, lost in her world of terror.  How would that look if one of the crew found her?  Or worse yet; if a State Trooper picked her up wandering the highway babbling incoherently about blood and murders.

M_ considered running back upstairs and getting dressed, but an almost paranoid sense of urgency pushed him to move quickly to the rear exit door to see if she was crunching around in the gravel parking lot.  That’s when he saw her.

B_ was sitting in a large booth near the back doors, looking like a lost child being so small and frail.  Her face was paler than usual, lit blue, then green, then red, as the Wurlitzer flashed its coloured lights from across the large room.  Her eyes were wide and she was staring at the table in front of her.

“B_?” Mac called to her softly as he crept near, afraid of spooking her into one of her fits of screaming, “B_, honey?”

She didn’t appear to hear him, continuing to stare at the table before her as he slid in beside her on the worn vinyl cushions.

“B_.” he whispered her name, gently stroking the hair on the back of her head.

“Can you see it?” B_ asked as softly as a morning breeze cutting through an open window, “It’s everywhere.”

M_ looked at the table and saw B_ had laid out her heroin rig and had gotten so far as to cook a shot in the blackened spoon that rested beside the syringe and lighter.

“I see your rig.” M_answered quietly.

“The walls are bleeding, the table bleeding, the floor bleeding.” B_ spoke as though she were revealing a solemn secret, “The world is bleeding, M_  Bleeding and dying, and soon we all will bleed and die.”

“You need to sleep, my love.” M_ said, “You just need to sleep to make this all go away.”

“I can’t.  I tried, but I can’t touch it now.” B_ whispered, staring at her rig in awe and fear, “Can’t you see?  Can’t you see?”

M_’s heart was breaking to see his love so deep in her hallucinations and her terror of what they had done.  He hated her rapid descent into drug addiction and worried about the damage it was doing to the child within her.  He knew from past experience that for him to argue that what she saw wasn’t real would set her weeping and screaming at him, even fighting him if he tried to embrace her.  He saw that the length of surgical tubing was still wrapped tightly around her left upper arm – she’d been about to inject herself.

“Close your eyes, B_” M_ said to her in the same tone one used with small children, “Just close your eyes, I promise it will be alright.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.” he assured her and she closed her eyes.

M_ picked up her syringe and dropped the tiny cotton wad into the amber liquid in the bowl of the spoon.  He carefully rested the tip of the needle in the saturated cotton wad and drew the liquid heroin mixture into the barrel of the syringe, filtering out the specks of impurities floating in it.  Then gently and slowly, he lifted her arm and laid it in his lap, finding a vein near the crook of her elbow and probing, drawing back in the plunger until he saw her blood mix with the heroin.  He pushed the plunger down, delivering the heroin into her bloodstream, then removed the needle and untied the tubing, allowing her blood to flow freely, to carry the heroin to circulate and find its way to B_’s brain, to attach to opioid receptors there.

The body takes twenty minutes to transform pure heroin into morphine, providing a high which can last hours, but before that happens, heroin delivers a sometimes overwhelming rush of ecstasy and sense of wellbeing.  It is a happy drug.

Beside him, B_ sighed, then leaned into him, her body warm and loose in his arms.

“Oh, M_.” she whispered, “Oh, M_.  Thank you … thank you … thank you …”

M_ slid her limp form out of the booth and carried her through the darkened honky-tonk and up the stairs like a sleeping child.  Her eyes remained closed and her face was relaxed, her lips twitching occasionally with a flickering smile.

“... lover-man ...” she murmured as he laid her down in their bed and pulled her covers over her, tucking them under her chin.

“Sleep now, B_” M_ said softly and kissed her pale cheek, “Everything is going to be alright.”

“… alright …” B_ echoed as she sunk into the dreamless bliss that saturated and swallowed her troubled mind.

But M_ knew it wasn’t going to be alright as he returned downstairs to collect her rig.  Nothing was going to be alright ever again.

"__&__"