“Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.” - Jules de Gaultier
Ivan locked the door.
Crossing the apartment room, he fingered the plastic bag in his coat pocket – smooth and bulging; like some over sized spider egg – and closed his eyes. He had gone through hell to get it tonight, but he knew the sack in his pocket would be worth every minute of breaking in, bartering, frequenting pawn shops, and running. Always running. This was pure stuff. Pure and almost the color of laundry detergent; like it had been taken directly from a white sand beach. It hadn't been cut, hadn't been bastardized. It was guaranteed to provide a one hundred percent high.
Todd had pulled through tonight.
Ivan wanted to pull the bag out and look at it, turn it over in his hands. Smell it. Taste it. Snort it. But instead he took his hand out of his coat pocket and balled it into a fist as he walked into the kitchen. He had to savor this stuff. Like good wine. You don't uncork the bottle and just gulp it down. You used a wine glass – crystal preferably, with laser cut designs – and you held it cupped in the palm of your hand, the stem protruding from between your fingers like an unlit cigarette. You crossed your legs and laughed while you drank it. You sipped it.
How do you sip crack, idiot?
Maybe you didn't. But Ivan wanted his haul to last. He wanted to feel every particle affect his body, his brain. What was in his pocket was like eighteenth century Bordeaux. Ivan had practically sold both legs and an arm cut off at the elbow to get it. He shivered as he thought of the night before and the Seven-Eleven. It had been close. He had fallen asleep that night with sirens still ringing in his ears, for God's sake.
Yeah, I'd like a big gulp, a milky way, and everything you've got in your register. You take visa, right?
Sighing, Ivan carefully pulled the bag out of his pocket and placed it on the counter, pushing aside paper plates and frozen food wrappers in the process. They fell to the floor silently, like white-trash snowflakes as he opened the cupboard door and lifted the mirror from the top shelf. His wine glass. He carried the mirror in his left hand, picked up the sack, and headed for his bedroom.
His face stared up at him in the mirror as he walked, frowning. It had gotten old looking, with gray, rutted wrinkles arching from the edges of his eyes and down from his nose and ends of his lips. Acne had broken out across his cheekbones – a second puberty – and his skin had a yellow jaundiced look to it. Ivan felt the top of his head impulsively. And he was loosing hair.
Why do you do this to yourself?
I've got no choice, you bastard.
Do you even see yourself? You're an addict. You rob convenience stores to pay for your obsession. You're sick, Ivy, sick. And you're gonna die in a couple of years. Either because you get shot by someone like Todd or because you OD.
We all die sometime.
In prison, though?
Ivan had stopped in the doorway to his room, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He was a monster. He had been possessed by the demons of self-destruction which had looped a rope around the support beams of his life, tied a hangman's noose and slipped it around his neck. All he had to do now was jump.
Ivan was a slave, he knew that. A slave to a god in powdered form. A god that passed through the hands of a hundred street criminals, sifted, bagged, tagged. And it was his life now: the great urban alleyway struggle between man and his body. His addictions. The little bags of crack that had blown things out of control too quickly for him to even realize that he woke up some mornings half-naked with people he didn't know, his face plastered to the ground with his own sweat and spit, instead of waking up with Julia.
You blew it, Ivy.
Anger bayoneted through his chest and he swore, hurling the mirror as hard as he could against the wall. Why the hell was he so stupid? Why couldn't he see through the powder he had thrown in his own eyes? College was gone, his parents were on the western seaboard and Julia was six feet under ground. And now he was living in New York as just another crime statistic. He sat on the side of his bed and stared at the bag in his hand. What was the point, for God's sake? Why did he care anymore? It was too late. There was nothing that could pull him out of the foxhole he'd fallen into. Recovery and abstinence were dramatized he knew, because, programs or not, people didn't drop addictions like they would drop a rock. Addictions were like zip ties; there was only one way to pull.
Ivan glancd at the mirror in the corner – shattered and splintered, shards of glass catching the dim light of the room; glinting, scintillating. He wished now he hadn't broken the mirror, his wine glass. He'd have to gulp now.
Ivan knelt by his bedside, his hands shaking, thinking of Julia the night of the wreck, and opened the bag. She had found five Nyquil bottles in the trashcan and a baggie of cocaine in his dresser drawer, lying nested in his socks that afternoon. Just the beginning. He had confessed to buying drugs from a guy named Todd for the last three months. She had told him to get help. He had said he didn't want any. Voices were raised. Bodies had tensed. Julia was suddenly leaving him. She had her coat, her shoes were on, she was running. Running for the door. Ivan ran after her. The door was open and she was out, sprinting down the hallway and down the flight of stairs leading to the parking lot. An engine had roared to life – somehow harsher sounding, like the rap of a gavel, preceding a ruling – as he stood on the balcony watching her leave.
The driver on the overpass had been drunk.
The doctors said the windshield had been like a guillotine.
Ivan closed his eyes and shook off the images. They fired off in his mind successively like pistons, each one making his chest hurt. He dumped an half-ounce of cocaine onto the dresser surface and pulled his wallet from his back pocket, selecting a credit card. Slowly, methodically, Ivan shaped the mound of white sand powder into a line, crushing it into an even finer silt. He wondered what Julia reaction would be if she walked in at that moment and caught him kneeling at the nightstand like a sinner before an altar, straw in hand. Shock, anger, horror. Maybe she'd leave again.
Would he try to stop her?
Something in the kitchen clattered to the tiled floor, jerking Ivan's head up and around. He paused, his heart suddenly drumming at his ribcage. A break-in? He lifted his head, tilting it to look out the door and felt his muscles contracting, tensing. No, it couldn't be. He lived in the slums, for God's sake. Slums were slums. Thieves and drug addicts had nothing to steal from each other. Ivan glanced at the cocaine line on his dresser and slowly rose from his knees to his feet. Unless someone knew he was loaded tonight.
Todd knew...
Another clatter. Ivan practically jumped. He groped for a weapon of some sort on the dresser and wrapped his hand around a broken lamp as he peered through the crack in his bedroom door. No shadows. No footsteps. He exhaled and let his shoulders relax, the lamp falling to his side. But he stayed where he was, staring out into the living room. Another sound and he was going in. Ivan tightened his grip on the lamp and rested his hand on the doornob.
Humming. Now he heard humming. From the kitchen, soft, mellifluous notes flowed towards Ivan like honey. He blinked. Maybe he was imagining it. Too much crack. He had to be hallucinating. Who the hell would break in to an addicts apartment, bang around in the kitchen, and start humming? Ivan listened closer. The music was faint, as if whoever was in his apartment was far away, just out of reach. Slowly, the notes became more distinct, forming patterns and measures like a clay statuette being fashioned in the hands of a sculptor. And then the humming methamorphisized into singing...
Somewhere over the rainbow,
blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow –
Ivan felt like he had been punched in the stomach. He took a step back, leaned against the dresser and slid down, staring at the ceiling, breathing heavily. Julia's song. Someone was in the kitchen singing Julia's song. He shook his head, ears ringing, throat completely dry – as if someone had shoved cotton balls into it. He was imagining it. No one was in the kitchen. He was alone. Just like he had been for the past five years. The product of good drugs, no job, and a criminal record the size of a novel. He was in the place society and mankind had dictated he be in. Governmentally ordained.
Just leave me alone, he wanted to scream.
Why then, oh why can't I?
Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
The voice was getting closer, coming from the living room. Ivan heard footsteps, soft and light, moving towards his door. He swore under his breath. He would split the skull of whoever opened that door, right down the middle, like a hardboiled egg. He would smile at the blood. Laugh at it. Ivan got to his feet silently, gripping the neck of the lamp.
Where troubles melt like lemondrops
Away above the chimney tops
His heart was pounding, moved from his chest to his ears, and he felt a pain collecting at the base of his head. Ivan blinked it away and held the lamp like baseball bat. Two strikes, two outs, and the bases are loaded. Let's hope this bastard hits that ball.
That's where you'll find me.
They were right outside the door. The footsteps stopped, the singing stopped. Ivan's mind was vibrating with anticipation, his muscles were coiled, locked, loaded. One more step. Whoever was on the other side of the door had a sick sense of humor. Ivan wanted to hit them just because they had been singing Julia's song. The cocaine on his dresser was beside the point. That white sand phrenic paradise...
The door began opening slowly and Ivan's mind was temporarily iced. He held the lamp poised in his hands, everything riding on it, but some sort of lockjaw descended upon him, constricting him him, binding him. The door opened further. He couldn't move. He groaned. The door brushed his nose and suddenly a figure was silhouetted in the living room, two feet away. Staring at him.
Move, you bastard, move!
“Ivan!”
The figure ran towards him, smiling, her movements lithe and graceful. She enveloped him in a hug and buried her head in his chest, a smell like lavender coming from her hair. Ivan's mouth was open. He choked.
Julia.
What the hell?
He dropped the lamp – which clattered to the floor and rolled towards his bed – and wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips against the top of her head, drinking the smell of lavender. She seemed to melt into his body, soft and fragile – like a glass ornament – and her hands grasped at his shirt sensuously. Ivan closed his eyes, his breath rattling. She was back? She was back. How was that possible? He had attended her funeral. He had placed roses, white ones, at her headstone.
In loving memory.
Julia suddenly looked up, her eyes searching his. He felt her fingers brush against the side of his face, tracing the wrinkles and the acne, and he closed his eyes, leaning forward to kiss her. She drew back.
“Ivan, what happened to you?”
Shocked, Ivan's eyes flew back open. Julia had her palms on his chest, frowning, looking irresistible in the dim half-light, her feature enhanced by the shadow that stretched across her face. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. How could this be happening? The crash, the grave, immediate and instantaneous death. The windshield was like a guillotine...
“What happened to you?”
Her frown deepened, “What do you mean?”
“The crash, the wreck – ” he gestured towards the window vaguely, shaking his head.
“The crash? Ivan, what are you talking about?”
“November fifteenth, seven forty-two PM, South Pacific Highway.”
“What?”
“You were in a car crash, Julia. You're – ”
Julia backed away, unraveling herself from him. Her eyes were dark and searching, flitting over his face, his clothes, the room. Her eyes found the nightstand, the altar, where the snow line lay innocently next to the bag of pure stuff. They lingered. “Ivan...”
Ivan moved in front of the nightstand and looked down. Julia seemed to be staring through him, as if he was transparent, intestines and organs laid bare in front of her. His heart laid bare. He was embarrassed suddenly. Embarrassed of the apartment, his health, his room. Julia's presence was an airhorn in his ears. You're living like an animal, Ivy. His civility, his humanness, had decayed, dissolved by narcotic acid. And here was Julia, dead, for God's sake, standing in front of him like a mirror, her expression reflecting what he had become.
She was back?
“Ivan...”
“How did you find me?”
“You're an addict, Ivan.”
“The phonebook? I'm not listed any more.”
“What the hell are you doing with your life? I'll leave you Ivan, I swear I will.”
Ivan paused. Leave him? She already had. For five God-awful years. What was she doing back, in New York, in his apartment? Now?
I'm hallucinating. That's the only answer. She's not really here.
But he had felt her touch. Warm and real and alive. He had smelled her hair and seen her eyes and felt her waist. Everything about her screamed that she was a solid, living, human apparition standing in his doorway. Heat and vitality radiated from her. A corporeal fountain of youth...
Drink.
He shook his head. No. It wasn't possible. He had seen her dead. He had been in the morgue, the body bag had been unzipped, and Julia had stared up at him. Completely dead, smelling like blood and decaying flesh, and broken. He turned away from Julia and leaned his forearm against the wall, closing his eyes. The windshield, for God's sake, the windshield. A French revolution guillotine. There was a long-haul truck driver in prison now, convicted of drunk driving and manslaughter. Julia's car had been scrapped. The coffin had been made out of cherry wood. He knew her grave site by heart.
She's dead, she's dead, she's dead!
“Ivan, I can help you.”
He shook his head. Maybe if he ignored her, she would go away...
But he didn't want her to go away. He wanted her to be real. He would stop. He swore he would. If anything was a motivation to lay off the snow, a second chance was. Forgiveness and repentance.
“Ivan.”
He turned around. “I – ”
Ivan stopped, his words choking in his throat, his eyes wide. The pain in the back of his head hit him hard and he backed up against the wall, grabbing the bedpost.
Julia stood before him, blood matting on the left side of her face, her hair sheared off in places, her jaw hanging open vacantly, exposing rotting teeth. He skin was white, almost gray, and was flecked with blood, almost like freckles. Both arms were twisted strangely out of position; one of the shaped like an 'L', the other sagging from her shoulder. She looked like a rag doll. A rag doll that had been sprinkled with red dye and shoved under the wheels of a moving car. She moved forward and the dim lighting caused the blood dripping down her forehead and the black wound around her neck to glisten. Still fresh...
Ivan moaned, his mind flat lining, the room spinning around him. He felt his eyes roll into the back of his head as Julia continued to move towards him. His back arched and he plastered himself further against the wall. He wanted to disappear into it, melt into it. And run. Run as fast and as far as he could. Away from –
“Ivan.”
