Scope

 A story I've written. It's quite long, and i'ts not really about me.

Slipping Slowly

 

By Joel Arvidsson

 

 

Yesterday, vomiting vodka and lumps of molten white bread into my toilet, I had what you would call an epiphany.

Shit, I’m surprised it still makes sense today. Then again, maybe that’s not such an achievement just now, navigating through my realism and coming out intact. Not if you consider my present condition.

I have a headache like you could prod it with a finger and it would snap at your hand with a million tiny teeth. Like something so ancient, the pain is the sound it makes as the bulk of it slowly ascends from the bottom of the Pacific.

Here’s the kicker; this is not a hangover headache. Yeah the kicker is, I went out drinking with an infection in my mouth just throwing itself at my nervous system. It hurt, but some other force was stronger.

Still, I did this, as you say, knowingly.

After the epiphany, and some other stuff, I crashed in the king-size. I kept waking from the pain, despite being crazy drunk, all through the night. And when I finally got up, naturally the infection was ten times worse. Half my face was swollen, I felt disgusting. The pain was horrifying, I couldn’t eat and I had to cancel my date for tonight.

Today I’ve been so sleep-deprived, and the pain in my mouth and the phone won’t let me nap. First time I almost sleep, it’s my dad.

“Hope everything’s alright,” he says.

Grunting through sealed lips, I wonder if this is a statement of parental concern or just concern about the state of the apartment. In either case he’s right to ask, I mean we did raid his bar. If he hadn’t known about the infection I’d have told him, “yeah, everything’s cool, we only drank the cheap stuff.”

 

Second time, it’s Dora.

No, she was not supposed to be my date tonight.

This girl is so tightly wound, she’s got a neurosis for every day of the week. Whenever she runs into someone she knows, she throws a scream pitched high enough to have every dog whining for ten blocks. And you’ll never catch her hanging out with a straight guy, she’s so terrified. Thing is, Dora’s too cute with her nervous sputter of a laugh and her obvious insanity for me not to chase her around. We’ve been meeting for coffee now and then for over a year, and I’ve yet to see her relaxed. And every time she brings a friend or two, for emotional support.

“How are you?” she asks over the phone.

In pain.

Last night, we’re drunk beyond belief on a park bench some ways from the club. We make out, like we never do when we’re sober, rocking back and forth on the bench like hobos. I keep trying to get across how drunk I am, how I got to get back to the club because Will’s got his stuff at my place and he doesn’t have a phone. But I inject too many drunken compliments into it, she doesn’t get how I’m trying to save her from the embarrassment of being covered in lumps of molten white bread. When I finally disentangle myself, it seems she’s close to a breakdown.

She says, “do we say goodbye? Will I see you back at the club, or are you going home?”

It’s adorable how she stresses about this.

I smile as I stumble away, saying, “I don’t know.”

This is when I go home to vomit.

Afterwards, epiphany or no, I staggered back down to the street. Yeah, I live right by the club, and Will had to have his stuff. Last night I still had some affection for that moron. Right now I’d blame him for the headache just so it would be someone I could exact my revenge upon.   

All day today I’ve been popping Aspirins like candy drops, trying to take the edge off the pain in my mouth to no avail. Yeah, the kicker is, my headache is a side effect from the pain pills.

I’d laugh if my mouth didn’t still hurt.

Last night, the vomit smell wafting from my mouth like dragon fire, I picture bits and pieces of what I’ve eaten thrown up and stuck in the infected wound. Bombarding the inside of my cheek, turned to a lumpy canvas, the wrong colour spreading from a cut in the middle. I picture bacteria like asteroids hurling towards helpless earth. Once I’m back down on the street I light a cigarette so the smoke will kill the bacteria as collateral, only stopping briefly on its way to make a tumour.

Hope I don’t run into Dora, she’d freak, or expect me to kiss her.

On the sidewalk outside the club, I can’t see anyone I know. I fear Will has already gone home, the way he’s prone to wander off when he runs out of stimulation. Standing stupidly, encased in the smell of vomit, I look around at no one. Then I spot this guy, people call him Paley.

Obviously, that’s because the half of his face that isn’t obscured by a curtain of dyed black hair is the colour of sun-bleached bones. Like the picked clean skeleton of a gazelle. This guy, I’ve talked to him on at least twenty different occasions over a year or two, and only recently has he begun to recognize my face. I’m guessing he’s still decades from remembering my name.

I go up and Paley looks at me quizzically for a moment before it hits him.

He says, “oh yeah, it’s you, right?”

I ask, “Have you seen my friend? Crazy tall, brown dreadlocks?”

Paleys mouth falls open for a second. Then he points toward the subway.

“Yeah, he left.”

Fuck.  

 

Third time I almost sleep today, it’s Will calling. When he doesn’t even mention the bag and the other stuff he left at my place, I think of the monstrous effort it cost me to get back down to the club to look for him after puking. A gesture that would apparently have been unnecessary even if it had succeeded in its purpose.

Will tells me that, when he got home, he drank the three beers he kept in the refrigerator. Adding drunk to drunk, he went out with his kid sister and her friend to skateboard. This was at four in the morning. Now Will’s balance is debatable at the best of times, but apparently he stood on that thing long enough for it to roll down into an underground parking garage. This is where he tripped, but somehow he stayed on his feet and was so exhilarated and impressed by this display he forgot to stop, running headfirst into a wall.

He tells me all of this without once acknowledging my suffering.

I cup my swollen cheek in my hand, telling him, “You should see my face man. I look like the one who ran into a wall. I’m fucking…asymmetrical.”

He laughs.

Whenever we’re out together, most times I only see him once or twice the whole evening. Last night’s no exception. The second we get to the club, he’s gone, off looking for someone who’ll recognize him. The way his silhouette is so distinct, his presence so obvious, a lot of people actually do. I slide in line next to Natalie, this girl I met like a year ago, always wearing these thick-rimmed glasses. Back when I met her, you’d never see her apart from this other girl, a poseur with a strange sense of fashion and, as it happens, my supposed date for tonight. Nowadays Natalie seemingly goes out by herself.

We chit-chat, and she says how she can’t go inside until she’s finished her wine. She asks me if I want to help her. We get our little stamps from the entrance guards and veer off toward the park. After I’ve watched her rummaging through some bushes, she holds up a plastic coke bottle filled with piss-coloured liquid and we sit down on a park bench where I will be making out with Dora in a few hours’ time.

Around us are these small patches of planted yellow flowers, pocket-sized landscaping. Right here in the middle of the park, the distance from any light source is so that a sliver of imagination might just break through the artificial chaos of my club nights. I can imagine anything to be there, just beyond visibility. For instance, something I haven’t already seen a billion times.

Just let me state right off the bat that I do not know this girl.

First thing she does is give me the wine. Then she lights a smoke, gives me one, and draws a giant breath.

“You know what?” she says.

I shake my head carefully without removing it from the bottle. She takes off her clunky glasses, revealing a butterfly-shaped rash along the bridge of her nose.

“I’ve just been diagnosed with lupus.”

The bitter wine slops around my infection like a molten tinge of pain. That’s it; there is no way out of this now. I’m a drinking buddy.

“There’s no cure,” she says in a flat voice, “I’m going to have it for the rest of my life.”

“No,” I say, “That’s terrible.”

I care maybe just a little bit.

She nods and stares melodramatically into the darkness, saying nothing.

“Is this why you’re out drinking by yourself?” I ask, hoping she has friends.

“What? No,” she says, pointing toward the club with her cigarette, “my boyfriend’s inside.”

Now I’ve heard her refer to this boyfriend of hers pretty much every time we’ve met over the last year, but I’ve never actually seen him. Now I’m starting to believe he’s a construct of her imagination. I suddenly envision her a hundred years from now, dead from lupus and haunting the lot outside the club, her ghostly apparition still waiting for that fictional boyfriend of hers to come out. Appearing at midnight with crazy in her eyes just like the rest of the clientele.   

Maybe it’s to distract me from the concept of her having a boyfriend, or it’s to bravely change the subject so that I will be obliged to change it back to her illness, when she says, “Is that disgusting guy with you again?”

“What, you mean Will?”

“Eh, yeah.”

Back when I was first tailing her friend, Will would keep hitting on Natalie. There was some groping involved.

“Yep, he’s here somewhere.”

Natalie looks around warily and, right on cue, Will staggers out of the bushes, carefully holstering his dick.

Naturally, I shout his name. He looks up like a schoolboy caught napping during class.

Natalie says, “please, just go with him.”

 

Fourth time I almost sleep, it’s my job calling. Denise is trying to cobble together a workforce up to the task of serving overpriced food to already fat tourists, and failing miserably. The blurs of static super-imposed over her voice on the phone makes the whole concept of my working life seem digitalized. Like my computer games, like something that isn’t really real.

“Can you work tonight?” she asks me. Her naiveté is staggering.

I tell her no, my face has swollen to an impressionistic painting and I’m really sorry, click.

Guilt is what drives me, and when it can’t it just grips me.

Like when Will and I are walking back through the park and I remark on how stupid he looks when he flips his hoodie up. His hurt expression, the strained quality in his voice as he tells me to go fuck myself.

I say, “so far, tonight sucks.” 

Just when Will sighs and holds his arms out all sardonic, saying, “Will you pull that tampon out and SMILE?” that’s when I’m brutally assaulted.

I crawl out from under the triple hug and the Champagne Supernovas zooms into view. These girls are the usual suspects around here, present every week and often seen hurling a collective fake laugh at some guy who has snubbed one of them or whatever.

Jenny is the beauty of the gang, adept at earning drinks with batting eyelids and always dangling a tiny handbag from her forearm. Carmen is the significantly shorter sidekick, and also the one I slept with when I was much too drunk to do anything but embarrass myself. Gina is colossal, and by far the most sympathetic of the trio, having grudgingly accepted the role of the fat friend.

Between the three of them, they know everyone.

I greet them with air kisses and just to get rid of them I say, “Natalie is over in the park by herself.”

Simultaneous curiosity and concern draw their eye brows together; they shove off and when I look around, Will is gone.

Then, naturally, I hear the shrill scream of Dora.

 

At the time of writing, the theory my epiphany gave way to has been unknowingly reaffirmed by several independent sources. Like earlier today when I went to buy the pills that spawned this headache.

This grinding, churning, steam-powered abomination, the Soviet battle tank of headaches. By the way it keeps me conscious, you’d think I survive by its throbbing pulse rather than that of my heart.

Anyway.

The woman behind the cash register at the pharmacy was one of the ugliest creatures I have ever laid eyes upon, the poor thing. In fact, I literally back away when I notice this. I decide against looking at her properly, but I’d swear she’s a sex-changed male. She charges for the stack of pills, looking unconcerned, and tells me to do the exact opposite of what my dentist told me. It hits me, maybe she’s unconcerned because I look like I’m about to fall over sideways from the discordant weight of my face.

Suddenly I realise that I would let this woman do anything. If she bent over the cash register and slapped me, I’d just stand there. She could freak out and stab someone, and I’d probably lie to the police for her. That’s how ugly she is. 

When I explain my condition to her, or rather to the digital price read-out, a stocky woman in a blue worker overall speaks up sympathetically from the queue behind me.

“Ouch, I had that last week. Hurts like hell.”

I can only nod.

Going out drinking last night was such a spectacular idea.

 

Fifth time, it’s Dora again. She’s concerned.

“Do you want me to come over?” she asks, like she’s my aunt or something. But I don’t have an aunt like that, and I’m in no fit state to see her. I mean, I look gang-raped.

So I say, “No, I’m really tired. But what are you doing tomorrow?”

Now she stammers, almost freaking out because she has to tell me no.

“I’m sorry, I can’t! I have this thing…I’m really sorry.”

I just chuckle.

Like when Paley had just told me Will left. There among the cigarettes and no jackets, in the noisy darkness, the humour of the situation catches up with me. I laugh with humanity’s greatest achievements, the pyramids, the moon landing, flashing through my field of vision and fading to reveal Paley and his stupid curtain of hair, staring at me like he’s forgotten who I am again.

Then Natalie comes up flanked by the Champagne Supernovas. Me, I’m ready to hug her out of half-faked sympathy, and she just wraps herself around a nonchalant Paley saying, “Hey honey.”

 

And so the epiphany was this. There is no dignified way out of my situation. Where I’m at, I can’t mature, grow out of a bad lifestyle if there is such a thing. The people around me will be investment bankers or middle management corporate whores in like five years, and I cannot compete. I can only gamble for pity. Right now, I have to keep spiralling downwards, before I can go up. The best course of action is to fuck things up worse, like I did my infection.

Pity, it’s such a powerful force. The way it compels people to not care what is deserved, smoothing over any guilt in one’s own misfortune. It’s my one ticket, my piece of floating wreckage with Titanic sinking beside me. My unsinkable life, all that potential and lavish grandeur descending to the bottom of existence and settling nicely on the bedrock.

Settling like a headache.