He turns the shower on to run cover. A nightly ritual at this point. He chops up lines of ketamine, crushes a menagerie of prescription pills, and combines all the various colors and consistencies of powder into a single pile. He’s also got oodles of scratch off lottery tickets, including a healthy mix of the cheaper $1 and $2 tickets and the bigger tickets that range up to $30 per, as well as both ‘match the number’ and word search-based games. He scratches away at whatever ticket catches his fancy as he cuts lines out of the amalgamated mystery pile, periodically bending his seasoned nose to the faux marble vanity for a snort.
The shower runs. As some of the ketamine and whatever else starts to take hold in his brain, he thinks he sees a cockroach scurry across the bathroom floor and duck behind the toilet. For a moment, he looks for a cup to trap it. He imagines regaling his girlfriend, who is sound asleep across the house, underfucked and on her way out soon, out of his life, that is, a fact unacknowledged by either but appreciated by both, with the news that he’s caught a cockroach. Has performed his boyfriendly duties in at least this one capacity. He imagines telling her the next morning, when they’re sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, independently scrolling phone and sucking vape, usually not saying much. Tomorrow, he will have something to say for once. Perhaps she’ll smile and say thank you. More likely, she’ll ask why it isn’t dead and disposed of yet. Maybe he should kill it? But now he can’t find it anymore. Can’t see it behind the toilet, though his vision is admittedly starting to blur. He stops squatting to look behind the toilet, has to get up and steady himself by putting one hand on the vanity and one hand on the sink faucet. Then he returns to the crushing, combining, cutting, scratching, and snorting.
The shower starts to steam. Sometimes, flakes of plastic from the scratch off lottery tickets combine with the pulverized ketamine and pills in the pile of power. He doesn’t really care, though he does halfheartedly try to separate these plastic shards from the lines he cuts to avoid snorting them. He figures concerns over microplastics are overblown, that he’ll blow most of them back out in a congealed mass of boogers, blood, and drugs that never entered his bloodstream anyway. That the environmentally contaminating remnants of money poorly spent will then make their way down the drain, into some other body of water and not his brain.
The steam fogs up the mirror. Really, it hardly matters whether he turns on the shower, he thinks. His girlfriend won’t hear what he’s doing from across the apartment and through two closed doors. Heck, she probably wouldn’t care even if she did, he thinks. Or, even if she did, even if she can tell what he’s doing, what he has been doing, even if she did care, does care, she’d be too avoidant to intervene, he thinks. Really, he knows he’s the one avoiding confrontation, avoiding it because she could use it as the catalyst to do the dipping out he knows she’s gearing up for. That said, doesn’t he kind of want that to happen? Isn’t he already reconciled to that fact? Really, the hot shower would do him a world of good. But he won’t get in it tonight.
The sound of water hitting tile is taking on an otherworldly drone. His vision blurs further, so much so that he closes one eye to try to focus it. He slumps over the sink and puts one hand up against the mirror now to steady himself further. He can barely understand whether he is winning the crossword scratch off he’s been working on, can’t really see, let alone comprehend, whether he is uncovering letters that fill in words on the board completely or whether he has completed enough words to constitute a win. What he can understand, at some level, is that this ritual is a ruse. To mask his guilt, shame. A desperate gamble that going through all these motions one more time may yield a different result. Might relieve him, or even absolve him permanently from constant anxiety, rumination. From the tangled mess of recurring memories of all the regrettable, embarrassing things he’s ever done, been, or even merely been subject to.
The shower runs. Maybe he is simply trying to see how far he can take it before someone intercedes on his behalf. Heck, he’d settle for someone expressing a modicum of concern. Too bad the cockroach is gone. Nothing to report to the girlfriend in the morning. Too bad the odds on scratch-off lottery tickets are terrible, a fact he knows full well. They’re printed right there on the back of the card; states are legally obligated to do that. There’s no secret that they’re a losing man’s game. Too bad the same can of course be said of drug addiction, a fact he also knows full well. Too bad the same can of course be said of letting relationships fade wordlessly into oblivion. At some level, he knows this project is one of obliteration. He vaguely hopes there’ll be a chance to rearrange the pieces of his mind thereafter. But he isn’t counting on that anymore.
A trickle of water from the shower begins leaking onto the floor. They say that change is most likely among addicts, that they’re at least more willing to give it an honest try, the closer they are to hitting bottom, to hitting a bottom that is simultaneously racing up at them as they fall towards it. The trouble is, sometimes there’s no bottom. The trouble is, sometimes the floor just falls right down out from under them. From under him. From under the bathroom floor. He cataracts through crumbling rubble, smashing his head on corroding pipes, getting zapped by electrical distribution infrastructure, hurtling past dozens of cockroaches in the earth’s mantle as it evaporates all around him, falling down and down and down and—
At least he’s found the cockroach again, he thinks, as he looks around, paralytic, but conscious in some capacity. Calm even, even as he falls. You would think this would be a terrifying situation to find yourself in. But he’s been here before. Still, every time he falls into a K hole, he does wonder whether it might be different this time. Whether this might be the time he doesn’t come back from it. He remembers the first few times; how he thought he had died. Remembers the feeling of complete understanding, of everything that had ever happened up to that point in his life making sense, being connected, forming a perfect ouroboros, a full loop, having all led up to this, and it all being fine, peaceful even, as the lights grew dim. Remembers dwelling in complete dark thoughtlessness thereafter, as if his brain were a computer that had run out of battery. Remembers thinking Ah, so this is it. Now, when he falls, he doesn’t make much of it.
Hopefully, when he comes to in 47 minutes, when he finds himself on the bathroom floor, having smashed his head into the medicine cabinet, it will knock some sense into him. Hopefully those cuts on his cheek won’t scar. Hopefully his girlfriend didn’t hear that. Or, maybe, hopefully she did. Hopefully, either way, either when she leaves or if she does say something, he’ll take it as a sign to make some changes. Hopefully, there is a bottom somewhere that can hold him. Hopefully, there’s a bottom at all. The shower runs. Water hits tile. The room is all steam.
