The Dunes Like White Birds Glide Away

Faolán doesn’t know how to fall out of love.

He and Plum cop in the city, from a guy she knows, and then decide to head to the beach. They are in Plum’s little car. The girl can drive. On the way, she speeds along, weaving in and out of traffic, making moves that Faolán himself wouldn’t dare try. It exhilarates him to see her pull these maneuvers off over and over again. Once they get off the highway, she slows down, and they drive through a section of pine woods before they come to the dunes and the lake. The beach is empty and Plum gets out and starts fixing her shot right away.

Faolán has managed to keep the stuff at arm’s length in spite of introducing her to it, but she is hooked. All she wants to do is get the shit into her veins as fast as possible. They are alone among the dunes and the surrounding pines. Plum does her share; as she rushes she lets out this low moan that makes all the hair on his arms stand up. She watches him like a satisfied cat as he unfolds the piece of foil like it is alien origami. There is a lot of dope inside, much more than two typical dimes. Plum asks him if he’s done a double before and when Faolán tells her “no, I haven’t,” she says “are you sure?” and Faolán thinks about this phrase for a moment and decides it is the definition of rhetorical, because the question itself was answered a long time ago or they wouldn’t be here at all, and here they are. The answer is always going to be yes, because it has always been yes before, and it will be yes after. It is always and forever yes, but the ritual is important. The phrase indicates that you are about to step over a line, that your life is about to be different. Asking the question is invoking the ritual; answering it is acknowledging the line and one’s own willingness to set foot on the other side. The rest of what follows can then proceed without any ill feeling with regards to the consequences, but these words are the demarcation point. He completes his part of this ritual by answering in the affirmative and moves on to the next bit. He brushes the foil so the junk falls into the spoon and cooks it. There’s a little whiff of vinegar and the stuff cooks golden with almost no cut, no sludge left behind. Faolán struggles to find a vein and is about to say fuck it and use one of the big ones on the back of his hand but Plum stops him and says she’ll do it. He trusts her; she seems to be able to hit him every time. He has actually come to prefer that she does it rather than he do it himself. She climbs up on his lap with her knees at his sides, facing him. Her jeans are tight and her crotch is pressed against him, a sensation he feels he will never, ever tire of. He wraps his belt around his bicep like a tourniquet. She gives him an affectionate kiss and then picks up his arm and pushes the back of his wrist to his forehead, so he is posed like a southern belle about to faint, then says, “stay like that,” and peers at his forearm, frowning. She runs her hand over his arm and pushes down a couple of times, then nods when she finds a vein she’s happy with. “Hold still,” she murmurs, and her breath is sweet and gentle and her voice is low; he can feel the dark tones of her husky mezzo-soprano vibrate the skin of his face and earlobe. Faolán shudders involuntarily with pleasure, frisson, anticipation. There is a monstrous sensuality here, a hideous intimacy in this. She is about to penetrate him and make him feel incredible; it’s backwards, but it feels sexual to him.  He wonders why the backwardness of it doesn’t bother him, and then decides that probably all junkies are at least a little bit queer, too, even if they don’t want to admit it. She takes the rig and he feels the needle slide in to his flesh smoothly, and there's an odd sensation in his arm of being filled somehow and then she whispers “let go,” in his ear. He doesn’t know if she means the belt or his life or what but he does what she says and an incredible wave of warmth flows through his body. He has time to say “oh my fucking… god,” before he is helpless and overwhelmed and speech is beyond him. His head falls forward into her breasts where she cradles it with one hand while he rushes. As powerful as the tide, the warmth surges into the darkest corners of his being. It first fills him with a placid, gentle light, and then flows out past the boundaries of his body to form a trembling vesicle around him, surrounding and protecting him, braced against the ravages of awareness. All the sick, stupid sadness, the negative noise in his head, that endless, chattering monologue, is finally stilled, leaving him utterly without anger or anxiety, without sorrow or suffering. For an age, he floats suspended in golden wavelengths of devastating comfort.

Faolán is totally and hopelessly OK.

Without the pain of consciousness to mark time it is difficult to know whether seconds or eons pass in this reverberating eternity. He is a willing prisoner to the tranquility of oblivion, the serenity of death. When he was a child, death scared him. He has very few memories from childhood. It seems to him that when he tries to recall that time he winds up stumbling though the mazes of youth and can’t find what he was looking for. But this is a recollection he finds again and again: he used to lie in bed at night and ponder “not-being” and how it could not be imagined because humans only have experiences of being. And then he would try to imagine it anyway and writhe with the impossibility of the whole thing.

He becomes aware that he is in a room with high ceilings, covered in rich, old, dark wood paneling. Walnut, he thinks, but he is uncertain. French gothic style, ornate carvings on the panels. He’s sitting at a wet bar, the top of which is white marble. There is a sound like a great bell tolling a single time.

Across from him is a woman.

She is pale, almost albino, she is so pale. Her skin is flawless and milky. He can see delicate blue veins running beneath her skin, an intricate tracery under her collarbone and above her breasts. She has high cheekbones and a celestial nose. There is a chain of some pale and precious metal running from her ear to her nose on the left side of her face. She is blonde, and again the whiteness of her startles him. Her silver hair frames her oval face. Her eyes are large and wide set but he cannot tell what color they are. Sometimes they look grey; sometimes hazel. Much depends on the light and the shadow. It bothers him that he can’t figure this out. She is wearing a strapless cocktail dress of crushed blue velvet. It reveals her bare shoulders, upon which are a pair of blackwork tattoos. On the right, a heart. On the left, a skull.

She is the most beautiful thing Faolán has ever seen.

“I am Death-By-Love,” she says.

Faolán is silent. He finds it difficult to meet her gaze; in her presence he feels all his flaws acutely.

She tells him, “She is not yours, Faolán. She belongs to me.”

He cannot speak.

She continues, “You could be mine too, if you wanted.”

She reaches across the bar and takes his hand in hers, then brings it to her mouth. She presses her pale pink lips against him, first the back of his hand, then his wrist, then his forearm. Her touch sends shivers racing up and down his spine. He feels weak.

She presses her mouth once again to his forearm but this time she bites down. Faolán can feel her teeth puncture the muscle. The pain is exquisite, paralyzing. He cannot move, cannot even wrench his arm away. All he can do is gasp, drawing breath sharply as all his muscles stiffen and lock.  She throws her head back and his blood runs from her lips, rich and deep red. The color is a contrast to her flesh, crimson rivulets running down the pale valleys of her throat. This is her due, he thinks. The price to be paid for the ecstasy of her touch. All she demands is everything, and that there be no limits. No limits to pleasure, no limits to pain, no limits to desire – is it possible to live that way? 

Her whispered question, sotto voce, silky, seductive, “Can you be brave?”

“Yes.” he answers.

“Would you die for me?”

He wants to say Yes, of course, Yes, please, Yes, but then he thinks of writhing in his bed as a boy. Trying to imagine eternal nonexistence. He hesitates...

Perhaps not…perhaps it is only possible to die that way.

...and her small smile widens, becomes a cruel crescent on her face where her lips and the bloodstains run together. Her bared teeth betray a baleful grin.

“You still fear death. You are a coward, Faolán. For a time you will call your cowardice good sense and so will others.  But in the end, I will have you.”

She leans forward and pulls his face to hers, and kisses him

Faolán bursts into flame. The blood on his arm evaporates instantly in the heat. The air is almost too hot to inhale and the smell is unreal: sweet, cloying and filled with death. He watches his skin char and peel away from his body, dropping away from the muscle in long, black, curled strips. The fire clings to him. It is greedy. It sucks away soft tissue and sends cinders of burning hair to dance on the heated updrafts. Faolán understands. This is not a punishment. This is a promise: the troth of oblivion. Her face grows dim, his vision wreathed in flames. He still cannot tell what color her eyes are…

…and then they are green with a golden sunburst around the pupil. He is staring into Plum’s face. The last thing he can recall clearly is an incredible wave of warmth flowing through his body. He still feels warm and untroubled. He realizes he has been on the nod and she has been trying to wake him. He hasn’t been asleep, though, not exactly. The experience with the white woman was far too real and vivid to be a dream. A hallucination? No, he doesn’t think so. It’s from some other place, some in-between place, the interzone between dreams and death.

“Hey,” Plum is crooning, “hey. Come back a little.”

“I’m here,” he manages to croak. His throat is sore, he can barely move his lips and tongue, his mouth completely dry, filled with corpse-dust. He sees that night has fallen and the fireflies have drifted over the dunes from the pines.  He wonders how long he has been out. Even my lungs are stiff, he thinks. He asks Plum.

“Almost three hours,” she says, stroking his chest, “you went out almost right away. You scared me. I thought I was gonna have to take you to the hospital.”

“What happened?” He is still having trouble speaking. He can tell he aches, but the pain is somehow distant. It carries no significance while he is still wrapped in the warm grasp of the dope.

“Right after you rushed you stopped breathing. For like four or five minutes. You really scared me, I didn’t think I could get you into the car. Then finally you started breathing again. That shit really did a number on you, huh?” He realizes he must not have moved that whole time, and that’s why he is sore.

They are alone on the dunes. Plum has stripped down and is wearing only a pair of panties covered with snow leopard rosettes. Faolán thinks she is gorgeous, one of those rare women who is wholly unselfconscious about her beauty. She never bothers with makeup and somehow looks better than any of the women who do. The only thing she ever does is dye her hair a vivid deep purple. She wears it in a long, angled bob that comes down past her jaw. It has grown a few inches since the last time she dyed it so the part closest to her scalp is caramel-blonde, her natural hair color. He has no idea what a girl this good looking is doing with him, but it makes him feel good that she is. Like he must be worth something.

She picks up a sheaf of papers in one hand. Faolán realizes it’s the novel he’s been writing and curses himself for having left it in the back of her car. Her expression is opaque, impassive. He finds himself drawn to this. He cannot tell what she is thinking. Usually he can read people. He can sense their emotions and state of mind. These are survival skills acquired in the fires of his childhood: is mom up to making lunch after the fight last night or will she scream at me if I wake her up? Is dad still feeling mean enough to hit me? People feel predictable to him, a simple matter of reading flashes of fury or fear in their eyes. Unlike most people, Plum is an enigma, a wildcard. He doesn’t know what she will say or do next. She feels dangerous to him but she also gives him a sense of elation. When he is with her he feels as if the future isn’t predetermined. As if they can actually change how it unfolds.

A frank and pornographic admission of how much he wants her is in the book and he worries about how she will react. Not that it will shock her – she’s shocked him more than he has ever shocked her, he’s certain – but that she might laugh at him. At his true and secret heart. She’s smiling a little.

“Do you mean it?” she asks.

He has no idea how to respond. “Oh, fuck off,” he says. He tries to roll back over but she pulls him gently back to face her.

“No, really,” she says, “Did you mean that? What you wrote?”

He studies her. Inscrutable as always. I don’t know what she wants me to say. He settles for the truth.

“Yeah,” he admits, “I meant it.”

“God, you’re such a fucking romantic,” she says, and she is laughing but it isn't unkind. She's pleased. He chuckles with her for a moment. It feels good.

Then she gives him a slow and serious look, and standing, she moves her hands down the rippling muscles of her belly to her panties and begins to slide them down her legs. She tells him, "I want you to do that. All of it."

He pulls her to him and kisses her as if he might somehow understand her this way, as if to drink her in.  They ravish and ravage each other, treat each other brutally, savagely. He marvels at the difference in texture between the sand and her bed, the lack of recoil, how solid and firm she feels with the powdered rock of the dunes supporting her, how hard.  The dope makes the sex almost tantric; he feels he can go on and on without orgasm and he fucks her until she is as lost in the ecstasy of penetration as he was earlier. Until she sobs for his release.

Afterward, they lie silent together among the clumps of grass that dot the cool sand, exhausted, and share a cigarette. The rippling sand forms dunes that seem to glide across the beach like great white birds. He puts his hands behind his head and looks up at the band of stars in the heavens. He watches fireflies hover above the dunes and the hypnotic dance of their soft yellow lights as they wink on and then off. He idly runs his fingers through a nearby mound of long grass as she goes down to the lake and splashes water on herself. Her body gleams in the starlight. She calls his name and as he nears her he sees a firefly land on the back of her fingers. It crawls from them to her palm as she turns her hand over. She cups it gently and brings her cupped hands to her face. She parts them, and the insect drifts out of them. It glows and it is so close to her that the glow illuminates her lips, nose, and eyes. She is not looking at it.  She is looking out across the lake. He watches a shadow of sorrow cross her face. It is gone almost before he can even register that it was ever there. As he stands by her in the dark, he replays the expression in his mind. Her momentary look of melancholy. Her eyes fixed on the empty horizon as if she saw some distant sadness and wondered at it. What a mystery she is! he thinks. What a gift! What an amazing and beautiful being!

He thinks back to the white woman wearing blue velvet. Not a dream. A vision. Yes. That’s it. He understands. They will lose each other.

Nothing can change this, he knows. This is an unalterable trajectory. It is made from the things that are innate to them and was set in motion at birth. It is predetermined and immutable.

Before the end, everything in the vision has happened.

 

Time passes. Years and years of it. Faolán cleans up, but she does not and this drives them apart. People praise him for having stopped using and for having left her when she would not. They tell him this is good sense. He hears it so often that he begins to believe it.

When word of her death reaches him, he does a brief stint in five-point restraints and he is forced to take Haldol, which makes him feel like there is a brick in his skull. It does not cure him or make things better. After this he becomes careful never to mention the words despair, ideation, or suicide around medical professionals, but they are constants, always present. He does his best to live a conventional life, tries to find something aside from death that can give him purpose. He keeps waiting for things to get better.

After she has gone, he finds that he understands what the poets are talking about when they talk about aching for someone. It is a physical ache: his throat throbs like it was swollen shut and the pain is real and present in every way.  A great hollow sensation that wells up from the center of his body like blood from a sudden wound and swallows him, engulfs him. A burning that pulses in his eyes and shoots through his throat and makes his heart flutter inside his ribcage. His heart like a kitten’s plaything, pierced with sharp new claws and teeth, injury without intent.  He thinks often of that moment by the shoreline and knows that when he saw that trace of sadness she showed him a glimpse of her true and secret heart. This memory is something he keeps close for the rest of his life, overwhelmed with gratitude for this keepsake she has bestowed on him, more private than any garter, and gifted in spite of his cowardice. That he wasn’t brave enough to walk into death with her becomes the fulcrum of his life and his greatest regret.

 

He's just quit the job and picked up from Lee and is standing outside smoking when the girl comes up to him. She’s in her early twenties, pale, slender, blue eyes, curly brown hair tucked into a stocking cap. He can tell right away she’s homeless. It’s too hot for the hat and she’s wearing too many clothes and her backpack is too big for her. He’s been homeless before.  When you have nowhere to leave things and trust they won’t be stolen, you wind up carrying it all with you, and that’s what tips him off.

She asks him if he can please buy her a cup of coffee at the café across the street so she can sit down in there for a while. He’s about to say Sure, I know how it is, but what he finds himself saying is:

“I just picked up a pile of really good dope and I do not give a fuck if I run my credit cards up. Why don’t we get a hotel room and get high?”

There’s a moment of shock but then her face lights up. “You serious?” she asks.

Faolán shows her the dope. She gives him an appraising glance and then lets her breath out in one swift go. Her shoulders relax. “Fuck it,” she says, “Ok. Let’s go. My name is Claire.”

They are close to the Medallion, which means the hotels aren’t cheap, but they are at least clean. Checking in, Faolán finds himself nervous, wondering what the hell he’s got himself into, and then is struck with how absurd his anxiety is. He wonders if the clerk will give him a hard time about staying with his “friend” but she doesn't even blink. They get up to the room. There’s a king size bed and they are up high so they can see the streets and the skyline. The buildings are thrown into shades of deep blue and black against a sky made blood red by the setting sun. It’s beautiful, he thinks. Then he pulls the drapes, takes a bag out and tosses it to Claire.

“You got your works?” he asks. She shucks her coat and hat off and nods. He can see her better now with some of the extra clothes off and the sun not in his face. She’s surprisingly pretty.  She hasn’t acquired that hard, used look people get when they have been on the street for a while. Usually the pretty girls find a way out of homelessness fast. Often it starts with something like this, he imagines. She takes a rig out of her backpack. He gets his own from the bag he carries it in and lays it on the bedside table.

He thinks about how things have changed since he was a young man. The dope game seems to get ever more vicious. The stuff going around these days isn’t heroin. It’s almost all cut – usually dorm - and fentanyl. One of the problems with this is that the lethal dose of fentanyl is tiny even for someone with a pretty high tolerance to opioids. And it’s not like this stuff is homogenized; guys mix it with a coffee grinder and that’s if you’re lucky. So there are hotspots, where you get a bag with a dose in it that can kill you. Faolán usually gets high alone, and is keenly aware of this.

He knows it’s not polite but, “How old are you?” he asks her.

“Twenty five.” She answers, “What about you?”

“I’m forty three.” He’s a fucking dinosaur in junkie years. These days he thinks it would have been best if he hadn’t made it out of his twenties. If, instead of resisting, he’d given himself to the white woman and burned and died with Plum.

She raises an eyebrow. “You don’t look forty three.”

“Well, that’s something. Thanks, I think. How long have you been doing this?” he asks her.

“What? Getting high? Like a year.” She replies.

Twenty five. A year. He wonders where she was a year ago when she was twenty four. He wonders if anyone asked her if she was sure.

“Ok. Don’t do that whole thing,” he tells her, “Don’t do more than like a third of it.”

She gives him a look like he can’t be serious, so he says, “This isn’t the usual street shit. Have you heard of grey death?” She gives him a vacant look and shakes her head no.

“OK. What you have there is a combination of carfentanil and heroin. There might be a little U-47700 in there too, that’s what I was told, but I kind of doubt it. It doesn’t have the slightest tinge of pink. I have no fucking idea what the cut is. Here, give me that.” he points to the bag he tossed to her. She hands it back to him and he taps the tiniest bit into her cooker. Her face scrunches up as she looks at it. “You ever see any dope that looked like that?” he asks her. She shakes her head. “Looks like powdered concrete or something doesn’t it?” he asks. She nods. “That’s part of the reason for the name. You can guess the other part, I’m sure. Be careful when you cook it, don’t put too much heat on it. I’m not sure it needs any heat at all to be honest. It will be completely clear, it’ll look almost like you are shooting water.”

“Ok.”

She sits down by the desk in the room and takes her shirt off so she’s in a black bra. She’s got an athletic build, small breasts, hard, flat stomach. She has a tattoo of a rose on her scapula. There’s a mirror at the desk and she investigates it.  He watches her slip the needle into the basilic vein on the underside of her arm. Using the mirror, she glances over at him, sees him watching. She keeps her eyes focused on him while she shoots. They are lambent in the dim room, her gaze almost defiant. Towards the end of the shot he sees her focus waver. A little sigh escapes her lips and she raises her eyebrows. She finishes and he watches her whole body relax as she drops the rig and puts her forehead into her hand, bracing the weight with her elbow on the little table. She breathes, “Ho-ly shit.” Then she looks over at him, blinking, and she laughs. It's an unaffected, natural laugh, a genuine laugh, and in that moment she goes way past pretty and all the way to gorgeous.

“Holy fucking shit,” she repeats, “you weren’t kidding.” She gives another short laugh and it makes him smile.

She says, “Thank you.  God, I needed that.” She sits there for a few moments, blissed out, and then asks “Is it ok if I take a shower?” It bothers him a little that she feels like she needs to ask permission. 

“Of course,” he says. She smiles at him and walks over to the bathroom and closes the door. Faolán heads to the elevator and outside to have a cigarette.

It’s after sundown, and it’s quiet. A thing he’s noticed about financial districts like the Medallion – they are so busy during the day, but at night it’s eerily empty.  People work there.  They don’t live there.  The quiet reminds him of a night ten years ago when Helen, his wife, wanted to go to a nearby park after sunset. It was high summer.

On that night they walked together through sunflowers that loomed over them like quiet giants, their shadows long in the faded evening.  As the sun set they were surrounded by the ephemeral glow of fireflies winking on and off. The air was sweet with the smells of high summer, a spicy floral scent mixed with the redolence of fresh water.  

And then, all of a sudden, not ten feet from them, there was a doe.

They both froze. He had never been so close to a doe before, and has not since. The doe nickered softly and smelled the air. She titled her head at them and Helen squeezed his hand gently and whispered “look,” and he saw a fawn, both of them mere feet away. He wondered that he could not see them before. Even the purple twilight doesn’t explain how they have appeared. Until now they were hiding, staying so still that they were invisible, the same way waterbirds sometimes freeze as they stalk a shoreline and vanish into the reeds behind them as the shadows shift. Faolán was filled with a quiet sense of wonder, transfixed between the doe, her fawn, and Helen, surrounded by gentle creatures with eyes like milk. What a gift they are! he thinks. He feels he could stay here forever, listening to the night sounds and watching the doe and her fawn. With Helen that night he felt as though he were someone else, perhaps even someone good.  He misses being able to pretend that he was a good person, and the gentle, humid summer nights he spent with her when there were fireflies everywhere.  The feeling is not quite nostalgia, but there is an overwhelming sense that something has been lost, as if he had a chance to alter the course of his life and missed it.

He finishes the cigarette, and flicks the butt and his memories into the pavement, then heads back up to the room. Claire is still in the shower. He sits back on the bed and takes his shirt off and looks at himself. His arms are a tracked horror show; they look like they have been splashed with hot fat or acid, covered with circular scars. At this point even the veins in the backs of his hands are all sunken, but there’s still one place between his thumb and forefinger on the side of his left hand that is plug and play. He doesn’t even have to tie off.

Claire comes out of the shower in her panties, breasts bare and white. Her nipples are a beautiful pale shade of pink and her hair is still wet and slicked back, though a few dark ringlets frame her face. She sits down at the edge of the bed and dries herself with a fluffy white hotel towel. He notices that in addition to the rose she has a small tattoo on the side of her buttock. Yes, sir say the words etched into the firm flesh of her flank. He wonders who made her do that, wonders that anyone could be so heartless.  Wonders that such heartlessness is so common.

“God, I feel so fucking good,” she says, “I needed that shower. And that shot.” She finishes drying herself off and tosses the towel on the floor. Faolán sits with his back against the headboard and she crawls toward him on her elbows and knees and she looks at him like she's searching his eyes for something, and then she leans forward and kisses him. And she kisses him again and then she starts kissing his chest and then his stomach, and he feels her fingers in the waistband of his jeans.

He stops her, putting his hands on her hands. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks her.

Her eyes flick to the ring he hasn’t taken off, and then back to his face, and he sees her lower lip tremble for a second. It’s all the answer he needs.

“You don’t have to,” he tells her.

“But…but…”

“I’m not going to kick you out. Don’t worry.”

She sighs. “Look, it’s not…like, you aren’t bad looking or anything. It’s fine. I’ve done it before.”

“I know,” he says.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she snaps, scowling, and then her eyes go wide. “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry I said that.  You aren’t going to hurt me are you?”

“No more than I already have,” he answers. Then, seeing the expression on her face, “I’m sorry. No, I won’t hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anybody. Look, it... all I mean is, it’s ok.  This isn’t a transaction, Claire.  That’s not why I’m doing this.”

She seems nonplussed, but she murmurs “Ok.” And then she asks, “Why aren’t you with her now?”

He sighs. “She’s gone, Claire. She left me. I don’t blame her. In the end I couldn’t make her happy. I can’t even make myself happy, I should have known I wouldn’t be able to make anyone else happy. But I tried. And it didn’t work.”

“Oh,” she says, and they are both quiet for a while.

Then he says, “I want to talk about it. Would you listen?”

She nods.

“When we met, I was acting like I was ok. Do you know what I mean? I was acting like plain old life was enough for me, like there wasn’t this immense vacuum in place of my soul that would never be satisfied. Like I could fall out of love as easily as I fell in love.

“I was good at acting this way. Because I wanted so bad for that to be true, you know? And I managed to fool her. I even fooled myself for a while. But the truth will out as they say. I don’t know what it is about us – there’s something different about junkies. Not everyone gets hooked, you know? A lot of the folks who are willing to go so far as to try something like heroin do get hooked, of course – but some don’t. And I have always wondered why that is. I think in the end, what separates us is that the ones who get hooked have something in them that loves oblivion. We want the sweet taste of death to sting our lips.  Because life is pain.

“I managed to fool myself for a long time that that wasn’t true. That I was a good person like her, that I loved life. And there was no one specific thing that made me realize otherwise. It was something that happened over time. I would wake up and each day I would believe a little less in what I was doing. That what I did mattered. That any of it had a point.

“When I was younger, I felt that sense of meaninglessness all the time but instead of making me retreat, it made me jump in to things headfirst, with no regard for the consequences. It looked like rage to other people, but it was a screen to keep me from touching despair, to keep me searching for a way to find some sense of purpose, to see if there was anything I could do to change the future. But I’ve come to the conclusion that there are things innate to us and to our circumstances that put us on a trajectory that we cannot change.

“Anyway, I gave it my best shot, you know? I tried hard to change my trajectory, and as part of that, when I met this woman I married her. And I managed to fool us both for a time. A pretty long time, really.

“But as much as I tried to pretend it wasn’t there, it caught up with me. It might have been different if we had kids. I might have been able to go on pretending that I had some reason to be here if that had happened. But it didn’t, and that’s for the best. I know people do it all the time, but it’s a shitty reason to bring another consciousness into this world.

“Anyway, it’s no one’s fault. This was always my trajectory. That’s how it was meant to be. I tried therapy. Anti-depressants. All the usual things. But no matter what I did, the sense of meaninglessness kept growing. You can’t fucking meditate your way out of this, you know? And therapists, even religions, they all say that feelings are ephemeral, transitory, that they don’t last. Well, this feeling lasts.  The void calls and calls. It’s been there since I was very little, and it has never gone away. La tristesse durera toujours. So I came back to this, to dope. It’s the only thing that ever made me feel genuinely good.

“And I hid it from her. I tried to pretend that everything was fine, was normal. I knew it would upset her, and I didn’t want to do that, and I didn’t want to talk to her about it because I felt that instead of convincing me that there was a purpose to everything, I might convince her that there wasn’t one, I would leave her as hollow and empty as I am myself. I would give her despair. So I didn’t say anything. And I set things up so that I couldn’t fuck us up too much. I let her run the finances.  I went on methadone so I’d have a baseline to operate off of and wouldn’t have to score or get sick. Two or three times a month I’d get a bunch of dope and get high for three or four days. It let me carry on like things were normal for a long time.

“It took a while but she finally asked me about it one day, and I had promised myself that even though I didn’t advertise it, I wasn’t going to lie to her if she asked me directly. And if she had been only been angry or upset, it would have been ok. And she was, but the thing that I had been so frightened of, the reason I hid it from her for so long, the thing that got me, was that she was ashamed of me. That’s a thing that we have in common, those of us who know despair. People like me and you, junkies, alcoholics, gambling addicts, suicides. What it feels like when someone you love is ashamed of you. It’s like the thing you are, at your core, isn’t good enough. Can never be good enough. And it’s not like you can defend it, you know? For those of us who are empty – who aren’t depressed, but despairing – there’s no cure for that.”

She gives him a solemn nod.

“So. That was more or less that. I told her I would let her keep everything, signed the house and the bank accounts over to her.  Which was only fair.  And let her go.  And so she went.  Or rather, I did.”

They sit for a few minutes, and then Faolán gets up and heads for the shower.

The shower feels good and he stays for a while, letting the hot water wash over him. He starts to get a little lightheaded so he squats down to avoid falling and sits there, absorbing the steam and heat.

When he gets done and comes back out to the bedroom, Claire is stretched out with her chin propped up on a pillow at the end of the bed, watching TV. Her back is creamy and a few freckles spot her shoulders.

He gets six bags out and considers. He has stayed in touch with a few of the guys he was homeless with, and buys his stuff from one of them, a guy named Lee who looks out for him. Lee warned him to take it easy with this stuff. He already has what would be a lethal dose of methadone in an opioid-intolerant person swimming around in his bloodstream.

“Hey. Hey Claire.” She looks over at him. The light of the television is like ghosts crawling over her face. Her eyes are pinned and she is frowning like she just woke up.

“You got any Narcan?” he asks.

She sits up, worried. “Yeah, but what the fuck are you planning to do?”

“Nothing. Just making sure,” he answers.

He puts five of the bags back, just does the one. It is every bit as strong as advertised, and he feels momentarily good enough that he decides he can wait a little longer. He joins Claire on the bed. She’s watching something; he doesn’t like television but decides to let her do what she wants for the night. At some point he nods off while the light from the television throws exaggerated shadows around the darkened room.

In the middle of the night he wakes and finds that Claire is pressed against him, nuzzling his neck and shoulder and caressing his chest. He rolls on to his side and they fold themselves together, his stomach against her back, and he holds on to her and strokes her hair, gently tugging on the ringlets and letting them bounce back. When he knows she’s almost asleep he kisses her on the back of the neck and they drift off together.

He sleeps late; usually he’s up at four thirty or five, and he spends the first few hours of his day trying to put the armor and the mask on so he can operate in society, but this day he doesn’t see the need. Now that he is committed he is relaxed. He’s still up before she is, and he spends a little time marveling at her in the dark room. Finally her eyes flutter open and she smiles at him, and he feels her smile stab his heart and is grateful for it.

She gets up and gets dressed.  He walks her down to the lobby and outside. It is a fine, warm day. He gives her two more bags and then gets the rest of the cash he has out and tries to give it to her. She shakes her head at first but he insists and eventually she takes the money. She begins to walk away and he watches as she fades into all the people hustling through the Medallion as first one person walks in front of her, and then another, and another, until he only sees little flashes of her through the crowd and he wonders at what an amazing thing it is to fall in love, and how lucky he is that even now, at the end, his heart beats a little faster when he thinks of her: what a mystery she is! what a gift!

He goes back up to the hotel room and takes out the rest of the dope. Seven left. Plenty. He looks out the window and marvels at the warm sun, the cloudless blue sky. He gets the dope ready and hits that spot on his hand again. Watching the blood feather into the needle as he pulls back, he knows he has connected. He pushes down on the plunger, and as he does it’s like he’s pushing the brain-noise out and the familiar sensation of being totally fine, of everything being absolutely and imperturbably fine, in. Three quarters of the way down he feels his spirit begin to become untethered from his flesh and dance in the annihilating waves of tranquility. It becomes lost in the interzone between dreams and death, and flies to a place he knew as a young man where clumps of grass grow from the sand. It is just after dark and parabolic dunes like white birds glide away across the beach in the soft starlight. Tonight, the stars have terrestrial counterparts: there are fireflies everywhere. They float gracefully through the humid air, winking on and off, on and off. He can hear the lake lap calmly at the shoreline in the distance. There is a piney, dusky smell in the air and he can just barely see the silhouette of a tree line stretching lazily behind him, while in front, the horizon is born from the lake, everything naked and empty. He lays back and lets the cool sand cradle him, with one leg bent at the knee and the other stretched out. One of the fireflies lands on his raised thigh and he idly watches it crawl over his leg, winking on and then off, on and then off, before it flies away. He lays there in the gentle darkness for a long time listening to the waves roll in and then out, and watching the fireflies winking on and then off, and he hears someone by the shoreline in the distance softly call his name.