“What’s it like?”
He laughed at the question. It was more of a chuckle, really. Deep, resonant, tinged with something like longing or regret, but short. First time I’d heard him laugh—ever. It was also the only indication that he knew I was even there. No hello, no response when I mentioned the others, nothing. He just kept staring at his hands; he hadn’t taken his eyes off them since I’d gotten there five minutes before, not even to blink.
His fingers were in constant motion, each one at a different speed, all in different directions. Occasionally, they’d contort in ways they had no business contorting, the acute popping of joints coming in loud and clear through the intercom on his side of the window between us. Every time, I’d reflexively look up at him for a reaction, any semblance of pain—but his blank expression never changed and his focus never shifted. All he did was watch. I couldn’t help but wonder if he saw hands at all.
Impatient, I tapped my own fingers on the metal table in front of me. “Hey. Jackass.”
“I’m thinking,” he whispered, lips parting just wide enough to utter the words before freezing in place again. I could barely hear him over the florescents.
Finally. Progress. “Yeah, well,” I started, glancing at my phone’s ambient display. Seven past six. “They’re only giving us half an hour today, so think faster. Look, I don’t need some philosophical bullshit this time. Just answer the question with whatever comes to—”
“Mind if I smoke?” His gaze darted to the half-spent pack of Camels on the tabletop as soon as the words flew out—and just like that, as if snapped out of a trance, he was himself again. With a roll of his shoulders, he plucked a cigarette from the pack in one fluid motion and slipped it into his mouth. I could see a tension that wasn’t there before fall away from him in waves, even before he struck a match—the last in the book—to complete the ritual by fire. Only after he took that first long drag did he look up to the glass, and it was then that I could see with absolute clarity that whatever unblinking, finger-twisting thing had crept into his mind had inexplicably crept back out—at least for the time being. All that was left was the man I knew.
He looked so tired.
“Sure. Be my guest,” I said, deadpan.
“Pardon my asking, but you were an addict, right?” He ignored the sarcasm. It sounded more like a statement than a question.
“My mother died of lung cancer,” I exhaled, deflating into my folding chair. “I don’t smoke.”
“Never said cigarettes.” He smirked. It was the tiniest gesture, a twitch, but I’d swear the corner of his mouth raised for a fraction of a second. Smug bastard, even as a Sleepwalker.
“What about my face screams addict?”
He shrugged and tapped his cigarette over a glass, the ashes mingling with what little remained of some dark-brown liquid not yet dried. “I hear things. So?”
I let the question hang. He was right; I was no stranger to addiction, and not so far removed from it that it didn’t remain a sore spot. We all handle grief in different ways. But I wasn’t about to tell him that, no matter what the hell he heard.
“I ask,” he continued, “because you asked. You want to know what it’s like, being this connected? I can only think to describe it as an addict would, and it takes an addict to understand—current or otherwise. So what’ll it be, Ms. Riley?”
He eased back into his chair, blowing smoke skyward. “Will I be wasting my time?”
“Feels like I’m wasting mine,” I mumbled. Despite myself, I gestured for him to continue.
“Control,” he began between drags. “It’s always about control. At first, it’s about the absence of it, the need for it. Sometimes, people want to drink, or smoke, or shoot up, sleep around—whatever—because they so badly want the freedom to make their own bad choices.” He punctuated every other sentence with a silence just long enough to expel the poison from his lungs. “‘I’m ruining my life because I want to, not because it’s in the cards, not because sometimes bad shit just happens.’ It’s an unrivaled, unwavering propensity for self-destruction.
“But other times, it’s something much more basic, more primal—it’s a craving for some feeling or emotion, something that you’ve been starving for. Starved of. So what do you do? You look for it, in alcohol, in pills, in sex, anything that makes you feel again. Before long, it’s the only thing that does. That’s when you’re screwed. This thing, whatever it is, becomes the most important thing in the world. You build your day around it. You think about it when you lay down to sleep. And just like that, any delusion you had of being in control shatters—and you don’t care.
“I’ve had my fair share of vices.” He let the half-spent cigarette fall into the glass, gesturing with both hands to the lead-lined room behind him. “Nothing compares to this. I see everything, layers of life that you can’t even—that you’d never know existed. Things we don’t even have words for. ‘What’s it like?’”
He leaned forward.
“It’s the best bad dream I’ve ever had. I don’t want to wake up.”
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
areudirty
snowghoul
janainaart
vaporwave
