It’s a Saturday night, and my friend Crystal and I are out at a bar in Portland, Maine — a plush, dimly lit place dotted with maroon sofas and mirrored cocktail tables. We’re in the dead center of the 2000s, and clubs like these are thriving. At the table next to us, there are three middle-aged women in identical black dresses that barely hit their knees, their faces caked with makeup, flecked with the light cast from a mirrored ball slowly revolving on the ceiling; they keep pointing a crooked finger at us, but Crystal just laughs them off, putting a palm over my arm. It’s a different matter that I have not spoken to her either in more than a week now. As far as I’m concerned, girls like her were nothing but grief. They lie to you, they make you worry, or they die.
Crystal has ordered a third glass of Gin tonic, not because we have anything to celebrate, but because Gin tonic is her drink of choice. She doesn’t stop to consider the fact that she doesn’t have a real job, and that eighteen-dollar glasses of drinks are perhaps a bit excessive. She has been taking her American Express bills as they arrive each month and shoving them into the bottom drawer of her desk. She receives messages on her answering machine on a regular basis now, demanding that she call the toll-free numbers of collection agencies.
Crystal clinks her glass against mine and grins at me as if we’re partners in crime and we’ve just gotten away with something. She acts like she is my closest friend now; we are bound by the fact that we have both lost someone we cared about. No one else understands us. That she is also a girl who likes to drink — that she can, in fact, drink me under the table — is perhaps not such a great reason to hang out either, but it’s summer and I am bored and curious about the lifestyle that she lives. We get together a couple of times a week, always choosing pretty places where the glasses are big and the waiters don’t blink when she orders the fourth glass. She pretends we are doing something other than getting shit-faced. She chain-smokes Camels and orders only dessert. By the end of these nights, our table is usually littered with lipstick-stained napkins, overflowing ashtrays, empty glasses, and half-finished crème brûlée.
The girl on the other end of the table is cute. She’s a blue-eyed, blonde-haired chick, and I find myself wondering what her life is like. She catches me looking at her and winks. I flush and look away. I lead an austere life on most days and the fact that I’m sitting here in a bar at one in the morning, with someone stoned and drunk who is flirting with the sax player — it’s as if somewhere along the way there was a fork in the road and it would be an understatement to say I took the wrong one. Retracing my steps back to where I started seems easy, yet impossible.
“I want some more cookies,” she whispers.
Cookies is her code for blow. She has reduced it to something sweet and wholesome in her mind. She opens her purse, takes the little envelope again, and heads back to the ladies’ room. That’s the thing about cocaine: One can never want just a few lines. Once it’s in your system, you crave more. There is no enough. I turn and am face to face with the girl from the corner who is walking towards us. As I leave the floor I catch her staring nakedly at my torso. What does she see? On nights like this, I feel transparent. People can see right through me. My real life is back home with my family. There, I am flesh and bone. It’s the summer of 2005.
Crystal finds me and collapses back into the banquette next to me.
“Let’s go,” she manages to say.
“What’s the matter?”
Her eyes are glassy.
“I don’t know … I don’t feel so good …” she moans.
She dips the corner of a cloth napkin into a glass of ice water and dabs it on her forehead. A cold trickle runs down between her eyebrows. Something bad is happening inside her, and I’m terrified.
She must have paid our bill, though I have no memory of this, and she holds on to my arm as we stand up. I just weave her through the crowd, back and forth, watching the prisms of light thrown around the room by the glass mirrors. All this motion is making her nauseated, and I’m afraid she’s going to be sick all over me or the three women next to us.
The street is deserted. This isn’t a busy part of town in the first place, but at this time of night, not a soul is out walking. The cool air hits my face as soon as we part the bar’s velvet curtains and for an instant, I feel a little disoriented myself.
“Jesus, C — how much did you do?” I ask.
“Too much,” she mutters.
She can’t get up. She is sitting on the curb with her head between her knees, and I’m afraid she’s going to vomit all over the street.
I stand behind her, reach under her armpits, and yank her to her feet. She holds on to me, and I feel her breasts pressed into the corners of my thumb. I turn her around and scrutinize her. She seems to have sobered up fast. Then again, she was the one making all the trips to the ladies’ room.
“Let’s get you something to eat,” I mutter firmly.
We walk to the corner of Eighth Avenue, where there’s an all-night joint called Rusty Lantern. At this hour it’s not exactly hopping. It’s a brightly lit room with neon accents, linoleum tables, and the kind of chairs I remember from shady joins in India. A couple of workers sit at a corner table, hunched over plates of bagels and eggs, their hard hats resting in the corner.
A waitress appears at our table.
“She’ll have a bagel and cream cheese, and we’ll have two cups of coffee,” I say in my best American voice.
“You’ll be okay — ”, I turn towards Crystal.
But I know enough to know that there’s no reason to believe in myself. She has not been okay in so long that I have no memory of what OK might feel like for her. I look over at the counter again, and the two workers are gone.
The waitress dumps two cups of coffee on the table so hard they slosh all over the paper mats.
“Was that necessary?” Crystal calls after her.
The waitress hates us — and why wouldn’t she? We are eminently hateable. A drunk girl and a brown guy — a weird couple especially at this time of the night.
As I turn back towards her, I see her whole body shaking with sobs. In the neon light of Rusty Lantern, I start to comprehend for the first time that I will never see her get any better. This has always been her normal. Time stretches and bends, and becomes something more infinite than my sodden mind can comprehend.
I come over to her side of the table and crouch next to her. She wraps her arms around me, her hair falling into my lap. She smells like Gin and coffee.
“Ssshhh…,” I murmur. “Breathe”
She can’t even get a sentence out.
“Do you want to go home?”
She nods.
“Okay, let’s go.” I lead her out of the diner, carrying her bagel in a brown paper bag. She holds on to my arm like an old woman and keeps her head down, tears dripping straight to the linoleum floor.
I hail a cab on Seventh Avenue and get in with her.
“I’m taking you home,” I say.
It is two thirty in the morning. We don’t hit a single light as we ride all the way uptown to her apartment building. Interstate 95 is dark. Families are asleep, tucked in. As we walk up to her house, Crystal fishes for keys in her handbag, and fiddles with the two locks on her door. I lean against the wall, waiting.
Once inside, I switch on a lamp and then rummage through her dresser drawers until I find a pair of flannel pajamas.
“Here we go,” I say.
She sits me on the bed, kneels in front of me, and removes her shoes. She holds a finger in the air and rotates it — A sign for me to turn around. I comply. But after a while, I semi-turn around to find her struggling to get into her pajamas. She has peeled off her ripped stockings, skirt, sweater, and bra. I help her into the pajamas, all the while making little soothing noises, as a parent might to an infant. When she’s finished dressing, I pull down the bed covers, plump the pillows, and tuck her into the bed.
I’ll never understand what kind of things are going on inside her head, I think to myself as I sit next to her in bed. She keeps staring straight ahead. The coke is starting to wear off and the reality of life is starting to hit her again.
For the last two months, I had spent hours absorbing her sadness without knowing where it came from. Sometimes she just disappeared. Not like other addicts — addicts I heard about, who drove off in their cars and never came home again — but just faded, as if she couldn’t really be there, not all of her. She would be sitting in a lawn chair smoking a Camel, and all of a sudden her eyes would grow vacant, her mouth would crumble, and she would stare off into the distance. I would follow her gaze to see what she was looking at, but I never saw what was making her so sad. I couldn’t make out the faint shadow of her unborn child that she miscarried right in this room or of her boyfriend Steve, lying weak and pale in the final months of his life just a street down from her house.
There was defeat in the stoop of her shoulders when she was sober, or in the way, she shook a few pills into the palm of her hand, then downed them in one gulp when she thought no one was looking. I sat there thinking that perhaps this was what it meant to be hit by the wrong end of fate; that along with growing older, the pinprick of sadness that was inside her too would spread until it covered my insides too — like a stain. I wanted to run, to be safe from the shadow of her mania. There were already danger signs — signs that she was fading fast herself.
In a photograph of her parents, she has hanging over her bed, they are walking down the aisle of their presbyterian family church on their wedding day deep down South. Her father is dashing in a well-cut dark suit, and her mother is elegant in an ankle-length ice-white gown. Their arms are linked as they walk together toward the cathedral, and her mother is smiling triumphantly at whoever is taking the picture, a thin cloud of netting floating over her face. Her father is smiling too, but now, as I look beyond the smile, I see that he is haunted — The same look that I have seen often in Crystal’s eyes. There are ghosts in his mind, the same ghosts of torrid depression swirling all around her, at the moment before they take their vows.
She is not yet born, and there is already a piece of her father that is dead.
Crystal tugs onto the sleeve of my shirt nudging me back to reality. She clutches my palm tightly as if needing to hold on to something.
“Try to sleep…,” I whisper.
But I’m afraid to fall asleep myself. If I allow myself to drift off, I fear she may never come back from the vortex. So I keep my eyes open. I stare at the ceiling, counting backward, reciting the Persian prayer of Ashem Vohu in my head, remembering the faces of my school teachers — Hoping that she makes it through the night without me having to call 911.
I hold her hand as she sleeps until the sun comes up.
