15. Roman #2
I hear myself beg and I don’t care. That’s the thing that should scare me and doesn’t anymore, that I’ll beg, that I have no floor left under me, that I’d get on my knees on this man’s hardwood and ask for anything if it bought me ten more minutes of the quiet.
He props up on an elbow and looks down at me.
I look back up at him wrecked and pleading.
I watch him decide to give me what I’m asking for, and I’m so grateful I could weep.
And here’s the sick joke I tell no one: I know exactly what this is.
I’m not a stupid man. I’ve sat through the same league seminars every player sits through, the ones with the slides, the brain scans, the percentages, the earnest doctor explaining how it works, how the hole gets dug, how the dose that quieted you Tuesday won’t touch you by Friday and you’ll need more, always more.
The math of it is cold, certain, pointed straight at a guy exactly like me.
I could draw the diagram. I could give the seminar.
I know the name for what I am the same way I know the name for an offside, and not one ounce of the knowing slows my hand or shuts my mouth or gets me up off this bed and out the door.
That’s the part the slides never explain.
They tell you what’s happening to you like that’ll be enough, like a man drowning has never once heard of water.
I know I’m drowning. I’m asking him to push my head down anyway, because down is the only place the noise stops.
He gets up. I hear a drawer, water running, his bare feet on the floor. When he comes back, he sits on the edge of the bed. He takes my hand, turns it palm up, and puts two pills in it.
I don’t ask what they are.
That’s the thing I’ll come back to, after, when there’s an after.
He doesn’t tell me and I don’t ask. There’s a half-second where the old Roman, the one who never missed a birthday, leans in from somewhere far away and says you don’t even know what those are.
I hear him, and I close my hand over the pills anyway.
Because I do know, near enough. I know they’re his, I know they come from the same hand that writes my scripts, runs my knee, takes away the word done.
I know they’ll make everything stop, and that’s the only fact I’m shopping for tonight.
What they are exactly doesn’t make the list. I asked him to make it stop.
This is him making it stop. I lift my hand to my mouth and take them, dry, while he watches.
I lie back down and wait for the quiet to come and take me.
It comes. God, it comes. It comes slow, heavy, warm, rolling up from my feet like a tide coming in over sand.
The bad room in my head goes dark one light at a time, Gus first, then the chair, then Theo, then the word, until there’s nothing left lit at all.
The ceiling goes soft. His hand is on my chest, I think, somewhere, anchoring me, and I’m aware of him moving over me again, of being touched, of wanting it and saying so, my own voice coming from a long way off telling him yes, telling him don’t stop, asking for it, getting it.
Everything’s loose, slow, good, far away, mine, all of it mine.
I chose it, I keep choosing it, every blurred minute of it I’m still in there saying yes.
I wake at dawn.
Gray light again, his ceiling, his sheets.
I’m sore in a dozen places and there are marks on me, a bruise blooming on my hip in the shape of a grip, a soreness that tells its own plain story.
I lie there in the early quiet and take inventory of my own body, and not one thing on it surprises me.
I remember asking. I remember all of it, blurred at the edges but mine, the begging, the pills in my palm, saying yes and meaning it.
Whatever happened to me last night, I asked for, and I’d ask again.
That should be the thing that finally scares me upright and out the door, that the marks all square with the asking and the asking doesn’t horrify me at all.
He’s already up. I can hear him in the kitchen, the ordinary sounds of a man making coffee, and I get my clothes on slow, every muscle complaining, and I find I can’t quite look at the bed.
—
I drive home with the windows down because the cold air is the only thing that feels honest.
The streets are empty, that blue scrubbed hour before the city wakes.
I’ve got the heater off, the window open, the wind hitting my face hard enough to sting.
I’m sore everywhere, hollowed out clean, and there’s a flat gray calm in me that I don’t trust but won’t question.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder. I glance at it at a red light.
A number I don’t know, local, no name attached.
I let it ring out. Three buzzes, four, then the screen goes dark with a little voicemail icon, and I don’t think about it twice.
Could be anyone. A scheduler, a robocall, somebody with the wrong number.
I’m not in the business of answering unknown numbers at five in the morning, I’m in the business of getting home and getting horizontal before the gray calm wears off, and a call I didn’t ask for from a name I don’t have is the easiest thing in the world to let slide off me this morning, when everything slides off me, when I am one long frictionless surface that nothing sticks to anymore.
The light goes green. I leave the phone face-down in the cupholder and I drive.
Somewhere in the voicemail I’m not going to listen to, a reporter named Erin Vasquez is saying her name into a machine, pulling a thread I don’t even know exists yet.
I roll home through the empty blue streets, sore and marked and calm, already counting the hours until I can go back.