Сьюзен Стрейт - Orange County Noir

Doc introduced me and we shook hands. Sandra wore a stethoscope draped over her shoulders the way people do in movies. I wondered when they stopped wearing them with the earpieces around their neck, the way they did when I was a kid and my mom was an ER nurse. I used to spend the midnight-to-7 a.m. shift with her on nights she couldn’t get our neighbor Doris to watch me and my sister.

The house smelled like the ERs of my childhood — the vague mix of cleaning fluids and urine and medicine and latex and rubbing alcohol. The latex and alcohol gave me the start of a hard-on and I thought about Amber and her latex nurse outfit. Doc grabbed two lollipops out of Sandra’s pocket and gave me one.

“Sandra and I have some business to attend to.”

She gestured upstairs. They headed up, with Doc telling me to wait for them.

“Is there a bathroom down here?” I asked.

Sandra told me to go into the living room and keep going to the right and back.

Which would have been fine, except the living room was where her patient happened to be. I was alone in a room with a dying stranger. The poor bastard. I walked into the room slowly, afraid to startle the guy. There was a stairwell to my right, where Doc had followed Sandra upstairs to wherever they were now, their talk muffled behind walls and hard to distinguish under the gentle drone of an oxygen machine.

As I walked forward, the main floor opened to a kitchen on the left and a huge sunken living room to the right. He was on a hospital-type bed in the middle of the room, facing away from me and toward a big-screen TV that was tuned to some talking heads, but the sound was muted. The oxygen machine droned on, interrupted by the beeps and peeps of a series of diagnostic indicators reading out numbers that were completely meaningless to me.

The man was on his back, his head turned painfully to the side. A tube ran into his mouth. He was motionless, except for a mindless chewing of the tube. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to register that I was there. His catheter bag seemed dangerously full and I made a mental note to mention that to Sandra when she came back down. It looked like it was going to spill onto the floor.

I walked by, careful not to step on any of the various wires and tubes on my way to the bathroom.

I closed the door behind me and searched the medicine cabinet. This, too, was mostly a time capsule from 1972. There was a container of Alberto VO5 hair treatment. A glass bottle of Listerine. A jar of Brylcreem. There didn’t seem to be much of anything worth taking, or anything from this century, aside from a bottle with two Xanax that I emptied on the spot. I took a couple of deep breaths and felt the candy Doc had given me in my pocket. I took it out, realizing it was a fentanyl lollipop.

It was supposed to be cherry, but it was really just some odd vaguely red flavor. I licked it for about ten seconds before chewing it to pieces, sliding it down my throat, and waiting for whatever relief it might offer. I sat on the closed toilet lid and read through a series of forgettable New Yorker cartoons. I closed my eyes and let the back of my head rest on the cool tile and waited for the drugs to unclench me. Soon, soon, soon , I told myself. I tried to take deep breaths, and before long I found myself breathing in synch with the oxygen apparatus out in the other room. I opened my eyes. The bathroom was small and dusty. The tub was filled with cobwebs. There was a door that led to a side yard and, out of habit, I made sure it was locked. I took some more breaths and waited for the drugs to have some effect. I left the bathroom, hoping that Doc and Sharon would have returned to save me from being alone with the dying man.

This is where drugs and straight people’s image of drugs tend to part ways: in rooms where life and death are at center stage. This guy, mind-numbed and clearly on his way out, probably would have cut a deal with whatever he believed in just to get a few more days of life — of a life like mine. That’s just fact. It’s not to make me think — think about how wrong what I’m doing is, think about the various paths we follow in life, think about what a stupid man I am for allowing this blessing of life to drift so far away from me. It simply IS.

My life was shit and I’d been there before. All my yesterdays and all my tomorrows were lining up the same — that’s what drugs do to you. They give you this illusion of control. I’d been through it enough to know it was fake. Any decent track record of clean time fucks your relapses. It’s hard to see them as anything but the worst idea you’ve grabbed onto in quite a while.

The guy on the bed would have cut any deal with any devil in the world to trade places with me. The sick thing, and I knew it was sick, was part of me would have traded with him for that steady morphine drip, quietly escorting me out of this life and into something quiet and peaceful, maybe.

He had no chance. I had, depending on the studies you read, probably about a 2 to 3 percent chance to clean up if it was court-ordered, maybe a double-digit chance if I went in myself. I was the walking dead, but that was a lot better than him there in his living room, mindlessly chomping on the sad, gummed tube.

I could still hear Doc and Sandra upstairs — they seemed to maybe be fucking, or at least in a conversational intimacy that suggested fucking. This brought my loneliness crashing down. I hate being left by myself in rooms, being alone where I don’t know anyone. But it could have been worse — at least the dying guy couldn’t talk. And this was a true blessing — he couldn’t move those wet, sad eyes of his to focus on me. If, for a second, I thought he could see me going through his meds, going through what was left of his life so I could get high, I think one of the last things he might have seen was me killing myself. At least I hope it would have been.

On a tray next to the bed was a box that looked like it had scripts in it. Score. They were fentanyl patches. The box had been opened, but there were several others under the bed. I grabbed five boxes. I tried several times to carry a sixth, but I dropped them all when I added one more, so I went with five and brought them back to my carrying bag.

Like so much crap in America, the packaging was obscene and unnecessary. The boxes held six patches each. I tore open the boxes, trying to be quiet, as I wasn’t sure if this was part of the deal with Sandra or not, and neatly stacked the patches until I had thirty of them ready for my bag. I would have taken more — would have taken every single one I could find — but I didn’t want to fuck up our connection for the future. I’d love to be able to say I was thinking about the dying guy — and it does happen, the groundswell of a decent human surfacing in me from time to time, often enough to not seem like a miracle — but the truth is, in that moment, I’d forgotten about him and his need for his own painkillers. He didn’t exist to me.

I chewed another of the fentanyl lollipops I found. They seemed pretty useless. I wondered if they’d put this guy on Oxy or anything good, pillwise, before they had him on the patches and the pops.

Inside the kitchen, next to the coffee cups, I discovered a cabinet filled with bottles of pills. The usual useless suspects — Advil, Tylenol, gaggles of vitamins, and, scattered inside the cabinet, the snake-oil desperation of shark’s fin and whale cartilage and shit like that. I pocketed a bottle with about ten ten-milligram Vicodin and kept scrambling through the cabinet until I found something worthwhile in a near-full jar of eighty-milligram OxyContin. I felt myself smile. I took two of the eighty-milligram tablets, crushing one and allowing the other to slide down my throat and release itself over time.