Chapter 12
Twelve
Jami
The room hums like a bad dream. Old AC, thin walls, the dull throb of a TV somewhere playing the same three commercials on an endless loop.
There’s a stain on the ceiling shaped like a moth.
I stare at it until the shape becomes wings and the wings become a door and the door becomes a sky I can’t reach.
I tell myself I’m fine. That I’m in control. That I can turn the volume down on everything inside me and still find the knob to turn it back up later. I can somehow move in and out of this reality like I used to.
That’s the lie. I know it and I say it to myself anyway.
My hands won’t stop shaking. Not with fear, not exactly. No, it’s with anticipation masquerading as relief. I’m tired of remembering.
I sit on the edge of the bed and count my breaths. Four in. Four hold. Four out. It’s a row boat on black water. I step into the boat and it lists. The oars aren’t there. I’m floating in the abyss.
I don’t look in the mirror. The mirror has opinions I can’t afford.
I don’t pray, either. I’ve done that already. I’ve studied the ceiling and asked it to turn into a reply. The silence felt like an answer I didn’t like.
The little pile on the nightstand looks harmless—like coarse salt, like dust in clumps.
My mouth waters in a way that makes me hate my body.
I know what happens next. Not the mechanics, I don’t have to play that over in my head, I’ve lived it a thousand times.
I crave what comes after the hit. The surrender.
The hush. The way the room loses corners and softens and, for a moment, everything agrees to be gentle.
I tell myself I’ll be careful. I tell myself there’s a version of this where I get to tiptoe and not fall. I tell myself I’ve learned so much; surely I can use what I know to keep from drowning in it. I am in control.
Then I stop telling myself anything and move the way my body remembers. Not a tutorial. Not a ritual, though it feels like one. Just the flick and press and sting that says, Okay. You can rest now. For a minute, you can escape.
The spoon is dirty so I let the flame of the lighter dance over the metal before pouring the little crystals and powder scraps in it.
The lines of cocaine don’t help anymore.
This is what I need, what I crave. I heat the heroin with a bit of water, watching the crystals dissolve before using my syringe to draw it up.
Attaching the needle, I flick my middle finger against it to remove any air bubbles.
I take a deep breath. I just need to get by. One more then I can pick up the pieces of my life yet again.
I tie my own past around my arm and turn away from the part of me that begs me not to. The moment the needle pierces my skin, the heat hits my bloodstream, my whole body sighs like a house that’s been waiting all winter for spring.
There you are, the room says.
There you are, my bones say.
There you are, my ghosts say, jealous and relieved and all wrong.
The first flood is always the same. The edges blur, the noise hushes, the ache goes from a siren to a lullaby. The part of me that flinches at footsteps, at phone calls, at memories that are dark—she crawls under the bed and goes quiet.
I float. The air loosens its grip around my throat.
I tell myself this is the last time. The last storm. The last bad decision before the good ones line up neatly again. Just one more tide going out before I let it come in and carry me somewhere kind.
A sound at the door.
A voice with a person that doesn’t knock.
“Up,” he commands, and the syllable drags across the carpet like a chair.
I blink, slow. The world feels like it’s ten feet to the left of where it should be. I don’t answer.
He comes in anyway—he always does. He doesn’t look at me like a person. He looks at me like merchandise. Head tilt, quick scan, the calculation of whether I can walk, whether I’ll talk, whether I’ll bite.
“You’re booked,” he explains. “Group. Don’t start a mess. Keep it quiet.” A bag lands on the bed beside me. Another kind of escape for a different kind of hour. “You’ll need that between. Might get sore. Don’t embarrass me.”
My mouth tries to form no. The sound dies on the back of my tongue. The soft is too soft; the light he turned on is too bright. The high tells me Shhh. Let me carry you a little longer.
“Up,” he repeats, not unkind, not kind, an order plain and simple. “Now.”
I stand. My knees disagree. The room tilts and then rights itself because the body is a marvel even when the mind is smoke. I despise that. I love that. I despise that I love that.
He looks me over once more. This time like a mechanic deciding whether to put a car on the road again. “Okay,” he shares, satisfied with the lie we’re both telling. “Smile if you can. Quiet if you can’t.”
I try to make my face obey. It gets halfway there, then quits.
He doesn’t care. He turns and I follow because that’s what today this life is…
following. Out into the hallway that smells like old rain and air freshener.
Past doors with numbers that can be bad luck.
Down to the room at the end where the curtains stay closed even though it’s still light out.
There’s a knock—him, not me. The door opens. The world narrows to a thin long tunnel and I walk inside of it.
Men. Too many. One on the bed, one at the desk, two near the window, all of them laughing too loudly. They look at me like I’m a toy.
“Hi,” I hear myself say. My voice is a button someone pushes to prove the machine works.
The first one stands. He’s all shoulders and aftershave. He gives me a look that wants to be gentle, wants to pretend. But the reality is kindness isn’t inside him.
After that, it becomes an interval. Not because I’m gone—I wish I were.
Because I am two people: the one who goes through the motions and the one who watches the ceiling stain become a moth and a door and a sky again.
The watcher wants to pry the window open and climb out onto a road that leads to coffee and sunlight and the sound of an engine under a man who loves me for simply breathing.
The one in the room keeps saying yes like a ghost who remembers the shape she was.
I try not to count. Counting makes it true. Counting makes it math, and math makes it an equation I have to solve. So I don’t. I never liked math. I let the numbers be blurry. I let the minutes melt into each other. I let the music from the parking lot fill the cracks.
The bag on the bed is a promise I hate. I don’t touch it at first. I tell myself I can do this on air and grit and the stupid numbness I bought an hour ago.
But bodies wear out faster than the lie.
My hands are clumsy where I wish they were claws.
The high I came in on is coming down in a matter of the third partner to have my body.
Knowing the relief I need is inside that bag mere inches away, I take it.
The smallest line—so small—and the whole room toggles from survive to float again.
Cocaine is good, heroin is better, meth would be best. For now the bump of cocaine will do.
I want to vomit at the simplicity of it.
I want to weep at the mercy of it. I want to scream because both are true.
“Good girl,” a voice says from somewhere.
“Don’t,” another says, not to me.
Laughter. A cough. The click of a lighter.
Water running in a bathroom that feels too far away.
It happens in loops. Touch, detach, drift, return.
Repeat. I find myself at the window once, fingers on the curtain daydreaming about the freedom of fresh air.
I could go, I think for a split second. I could try the knob and run.
But to where? He’s in the hall. They’re in the room.
My body is a coin in someone else’s pocket. I step back.
Halfway through—no, not halfway; there’s no true middle in a thing like this—I make a bargain with myself.
If I live through this hour, I will go back.
I will walk into a church basement that smells like bad coffee and plop into one of the folding chairs of shame and I will say my name like a woman who has one.
If I live through this night, I will hand myself to people who know how to hold what I can’t.
I will call my sister. I will tell the truth. I will pick myself up once again.
It feels like a promise. It feels like a threat. It feels like a prayer I might mean.
The room tilts again. The moth on the ceiling beats its wings taunting me. The noise around me gets loud, then far. Someone is talking about a game on Saturday. Someone is looking for their phone. Someone is asking me a question, my body answers because that is what bodies do when minds can’t.
I keep breathing. That’s my job now. In, hold it for a second, out. The same row boat on the same black water, only now the oars are hands I don’t recognize and the shoreline is a rumor in the far distance I can’t see.
Another dip into the bag. Another ugly mercy.
I am not brave. I am not noble. I am not anything but a person who made a choice and is trying to make it to the other side of it.
I keep my eyes on the stain on the ceiling.
I let the moth be a sky again. The room door opens.
The door closes. Shoes squeak. A zipper.
The bathroom faucet. Ice in a cup. Voices like radio static. The bed creaks.
Time doesn’t move forward, it folds around me, consuming me.
It doesn’t hurt, not in the way people think. That’s the cruelty. Pain would make a boundary. Numbness has no edges, and so I slide into my own oblivion.
I think of the beach and the woman with the blade for a mouth. Trash stays trash. I tell the ceiling that I am not trash, that I am a person making a terrible choice in a room full of them and that tomorrow I will choose differently. The ceiling does not answer. The moth doesn’t move.
The last man leaves and the room exhales. The handler steps inside and looks at me and then looks away because even he has a threshold, which enrages me. He could do this and still not look?
What did he expect to see? I had how many men put their cocks in every hole on me they could find except maybe my ear even though I swear one of them may have tried because there are remnants of the men left in my hair, on my breasts, between my legs, down my thighs, on my back, between my ass, and pretty much all of me except a few inches of one leg.
Their release left as evidence of what I allowed them to do to me.
He picks up the bag and weighs it with a glance. “Good,” he mutters, to the air, to his ledger. “I’ll settle in the morning with what is left of your cut after what you’ve used.”
Money. That’s what first light will bring. Money and a new bill immediately afterwards—a room charge, a debt, a wardrobe, a different kind of quiet. And me, caught between promising myself a miracle and breaking in ways that don’t make sound.
He leaves. The door clicks. The lock turns. The chain slides.
Silence, real this time, not the kind the body buys. I am alone in the room with the last thin smear of escape and a bed that doesn’t care who sleeps in it.
The promise returns. If I make it through this night, I will go back. I will sit in the back row and not look up when I say it: Hi, I’m Jameson Rivera and let the room say Hi back. I will let the fluorescent lights be church and the coffee be communion and the truth be something heavier than shame.
I whisper it like a vow. It lands on my lips and stays there, shy of anyone else’s ears.
I lie down because there is nowhere else to go.
The ceiling stain turns back into a moth and then into nothing at all.
The room lurches in a way that is not the room.
The softness dips toward black, then pulls up.
Dips again. I ride it because what else can I do?
The body wants what it wants; the heart wants what it wants; the part of me that wants to see daybreak wants everything.
The window is a dark square that could be another life. The curtain shivers when the AC kicks on, a weak, brave thing trying to look like wind.
My pulse stutters. A cold slide moves under my skin, not the nice kind, not the float. The kind that says the line I walk can disappear. My hands tingle and then go far away. The room stretches and snaps, stretches and snaps.
Stay, I tell myself.
Stay, says the wall.
Stay, says the bed.
Stay, says the promise.
The last thing I think, before the world lowers over me like a lid, is small and enormous at once: If I live through this, I will choose the light. Please let there still be light to choose.
The dark comes on soft. Not a door slamming—more like the tide coming in the midst of a hurricane.
It’s all fury and fight above it, but underneath always rolling in ever steady.
For a second, I float. For a second, I am thirteen and twenty-three and thirty-three and none of those numbers matter because I am just a body trying not to disappear.
Then everything narrows to a thread.
Then the thread thins.
Then the thread snaps.
Then the room goes very, very quiet.
I don’t know if the next sound I’ll hear is morning. I don’t know if the next face I’ll see is mercy or the brutal truth of how low I have fallen again.
I hold the promise in my mouth like a stone. If I can make it through tonight, I’ll turn things around tomorrow.
And with those last thoughts the night takes me in her sweet embrace.