Rumble, rumble, grumble, growl. The ghosts tumbled over themselves, over and over, like sloppy drunks in the dirty gray dimension behind the glass. It looked like torture—the symbolic kind of eternal punishment in a Greek myth. Something the gods devised to teach all mankind a lesson. Maybe they shouldn’t have become so stained.
The acid burn of last night’s puke still scratched his throat. Donal’s tongue tasted like toxic desert asphalt, and his eyes felt bruised from the inside. The sunlight through the smeared glass hurt like hell. A pulsing rhythm of madness filled the room. The rows of machines created an air of sleepwalking tension that lulled the forlorn into a trance but still kept them on edge. This place was his headache. They were one. It was a painful, nauseated dream.
Last year’s calendar was taped to the wall, frayed and trapped in the joy of December 1991. The old Street Fighter game in the back played its intro in a never-ending loop. The tinny synthesizer tune was punctuated by the sound effect of cracking bones. The machine didn’t work, so it simply ran the grunting, thwacking Kung Fu scene over and over. The Ms. Pac-Man next to it was so beaten and fouled that even the bored, fearless neighborhood kids wouldn’t touch it. Donal felt a strong gag coming and clutched the bench. The sensation passed. He loosened his grip with an exhale and a shiver.
There were many people around, most of them hypnotized by the swirling circles. The dire and forgotten sat here, their eyes daring the owner to try and prove that none of those clothes in the machines were theirs. Ready to fight for their right to loiter in a place where nobody should want to be. Sitting next to them didn’t make Donal feel any better about himself by comparison. He was part of this.
Donal thought it’d be cool if people could leave here somehow different from the way they came in. Cleaner. But they didn’t. The machine by the door offered CHANGE, but it was a lie.
The girl next to him was seriously hot. Thick chestnut hair, luminous dark eyes—she was curvy and strong and smoldering. She couldn’t sit still. So excited by this world and all the people in it, or more likely by the notion of sex on this fine day, her body was grinding in a slow dance as she sat on the bench, talking nonstop. He thought she said her name was Raquel. She was describing how much she loved being a vegetarian.
The pink Formica curved so awkwardly that Donal needed to keep his feet pressed against the floor at all times or slide off. Perhaps that was the intent—to prevent people from sitting here for too long—but it was agonizing when every second he fought the hot vomit trying to escape. Through the grimy window, Donal saw his building up the hill. The sidewalk out front was crowded with dregs, and that pay phone by the bench was a star.
Donal kept thinking about a cop show he saw filming in the neighborhood. Whenever the cops were driving in their patrol car, talking about the “case” or their “lives,” the white noise background coming over the police scanner always said the same thing. The nasal woman’s voice droned through the static: “Drug deal in progress, 4th and Rose…” It happened every time. Donal supposed the people who made the TV show figured no one would notice this because it was only background noise and people were paying attention to what the characters were saying about the “case” or their “lives.” But Donal always noticed it.
And sure enough, here at 4th and Rose, there was a drug deal in progress. And another one. Donal stared at the subtle gestures of illegal transactions—automatic, like a second language.
A few sun-poisoned addicts sat on the concrete under the pay phone. Others leaned against the waist-high chain-link fence, jumping to the sky every time the pay phone rang. Grubby dealers sat on the bench, ready to call when their pagers sounded. Donal thought he could see an unspoken hierarchy in the group around the pay phone, and this morning it was going according to plan.
In the laundromat, the unending deep rumble continued.
She was still talking.
While Raquel found being a vegetarian extraordinarily fulfilling, she aspired higher and intended to evolve into being a fruitarian. Wow, I’m doing an awesome job seeming interested in this, he thought. With a wanton smile, Raquel told Donal she felt like she was inside his soul and that they were “so connecting.” Her eyes never left his, with an invasive gaze that was sweet and filthy at the same time.
Damn, she’s beautiful.
She was stroking him with her mind. Jesus, if she’s like this on a Sunday morning, what’s she like during the rest of the week?
Explain to me more about being a fruitarian, Raquel, like I can’t imagine what the fuck that means.
Donal’s attention began to drift. So now we’re hearing about different fruits. And what they do. God, she’s hot.
Donal was still puzzling over what he’d found that morning. How all that got on his sheets. And the pillows. And the floor. He decided the filth was so extreme he couldn’t wash it in the building’s laundry room. A mess like that might fuck up the washing machine, and then people would ask questions. Fortunately, there was a seedy laundromat at the bottom of the hill for those extra disgusting laundry tasks.
Donal glanced at his building again. If anybody saw me washing that shit in the laundry room, they’d start wondering about me. Again.
Donal was sick of people wondering about him. Cautiously saying things. Thinking he was weird. Or dangerous. Or a problem. Someone who needed to be watched.
It happened everywhere he went.
Mostly because it was true.
Donal knew that, and he wanted to change it.
An argument flared up among the addicts at the pay phone, fast and snarling like dingoes fighting over a baby. Donal had no idea what time it was. The clock above the front door was broken. Unless it’s 5:20 a.m. or p.m., neither of which is possible. But time in this godforsaken place ran on a separate track from the rest of the world.
He lurched forward, about to puke, but stopped it.
Donal tried to remember what he could from the night before. There was a lot of drinking and a mountain of drugs. Somebody had pills they couldn’t identify, and Sebastian tried to look them up in his big book of pharmaceuticals. Wento’s freaky traveler friend had a bottle of absinthe he’d snuck back from Czechoslovakia. Donal drank a good amount of that. He’d never tried absinthe before. They said it was a narcotic and illegal in the U.S., so Donal felt obligated to give it a shot.
The absinthe tasted a little like licorice and a lot like antifreeze. It had a strange, viscous quality. Siren’s surfer junkie brother was drinking a lot of it too. Donal didn’t talk to him very often and was surprised by how interesting he was—until the guy doubled over, mid-sentence, and hurled. Just chatting away and then a huge splattering retch. Donal figured that junkies were more accustomed to spewing than other people because the dude was super casual about it and resumed talking as if nothing had happened. Then he wobbled on his feet, and Donal handed him over to Siren, who seemed used to it.
Donal couldn’t remember the surfer junkie’s name.
Raquel was still talking while the machines growled from all sides.
She seems to be running through a recap of her intake stages, he thought, trying to catch up. Right now, she’s a vegetarian. Then comes the exciting shift to fruitarian. But eventually, she’s going to be a breatharian.
Wait, did I hear that right?
Donal grinned. “So, is a breatharian what it sounds like?”
“Yes,” she replied, staring at him with that look. “Isn’t it amazing?”
Yeah, more like a bullshitarian, Donal thought. How long does she think she’ll survive on only oxygen?
But she clearly wanted to fool around. She was writhing like a snake.
Round and round the dryers spun.
Maybe I should tell her that last night I sucked down some tequila, did a lot of drugs, killed a bottle of absinthe with some folks, then blacked out and puked and pissed myself and shit my pants and somehow, maybe accidentally, maybe not, sliced my wrists and bled a lot, and all this covered the sheets that I probably should have thrown out instead of washing here in this suffocating static-electric laundromat.
Donal smiled at her. From the look of her, she’d probably still want to fuck. She’s sort of fucking right now, actually, dry-humping the pink Formica bench.
She returned his smile with eyes that were raunchy and stunning. Maybe she sensed his thoughts because she was now saying that breatharianism wasn’t necessarily a state people lived in—it was more something that people aspired to. A goal to be achieved, step by step.
“Sure. Like anorexia,” Donal said.
She laughed and felt his shoulder.
What’s Raquel going to think when we get naked and she sees those messy bandages on my wrists?
I’ll tell her something. Judging from what she’s said so far, she’ll believe almost anything.
Donal wondered if it was time for him to quit drinking. He was afraid to discover what happened when he blacked out and his survival mechanisms failed.
Fuck.
Do I want to live, or do I want to die? And what better place to hash this out than the miserable fucking laundromat down the hill?
Some parts of Donal hated the other parts. There was a battle raging inside him.
Maybe everybody’s like that, he tried to tell himself.
But everyone’s war with themselves isn’t that terminal.
Everyone doesn’t wake up in sheets covered with blood, with new cuts that were a sad failure if they were supposed to be fatal.
At least that other time, I made a real go of it.
Donal’s suicidal tendencies had always made him feel like a loser.
Because at the end of the day, only chickenshits and quitters kill themselves.
Unless you have chronic pain, unbearable grief, or some other tragic condition that I haven’t got.
Last night scared Donal far more than he wanted to admit. He felt like maybe he wasn’t in charge anymore.
But then, who is?
Donal was pretty certain he wanted to live.
All that blood on the sheets might tell a different story.
Donal was trying his hardest to break through and recall the night before—to think of ways those cuts might have been an accident.
But what do you do if you can’t trust yourself?
Is it still suicide if you do it when you’re blacked out and don’t remember it?
In a way, isn’t that more like murdering yourself?
Can you actually murder yourself?
What kind of asshole does that?
He didn’t understand why last night happened.
He could usually drink a lot and not black out.
Hell, most nights I can suck down half a bottle of tequila and remain totally presentable.
Has to be good tequila, though.
Maybe that was it.
What the hell is in absinthe anyway?
Donal didn’t want to think about how the blood got all over his bed.
I guess I’ll take her home.