Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

I push my body into Tristan’s, even though trying to hide is useless. Soon there is someone at the door. A thin, tattooed man with half his head shaved and the other half black and down to his ear. He is wearing a leather coat and baggy black jeans, and I can’t make out if he’s a punk or in a gang or both. “Hey,” he tells Tristan, then opens the door wide to let us in, but not wide enough that I don’t have to squeeze past him and smell his peculiar mix of sweat, cigarettes, and cologne.

There are more dogs inside, a boxer and a lab, sitting on one of the couches. They don’t look up when they see us. I have to bite my lip to hold in my shock. I’ve seen punk houses plenty of times, but I’ve never seen a drug house, and they may as well be different planets of disarray. From where I stand, I can count three or four dirty mattresses without any sheets scattered about the bedrooms, and even more couches and armchairs that look like they’ve been snatched out of the junkyard then repeatedly beaten with sticks. There are empty pizza cartons filled with cigarettes and circular pieces of cardboard with old cheese stuck on, an array of empty soda bottles and cans that would make a recycling aficionado burn with delight, except that they are also filled with old cigarette butts. It probably goes without saying that the smell is enough to knock me out.

“This your girlfriend?” asks an olive-skinned, very tattooed pot-bellied man who Tristan introduces as Santiago. He coughs, clearing his voice of its phlegm, without covering his mouth, and doesn’t get up from where he sits between the dogs. “Shitttt. Nice job,” he tells Tristan with an approving nod to my chest, his voice thick with an accent and possibly a massive amount of marijuana or pain killers. His eyes are red and half-closed like he could fall asleep at any moment.

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” Tristan responds, trying to brush it off.

Santiago stands up and reaches for my hand, then kisses it. “How may I be of service, miss lady?”

I swallow the lump in my throat and try not to scream, which is what I feel like doing when his skin touches mine. Instead I reach into my pocket and hand over a rolled-up wad of bills that I know amounts to a hundred dollars. So that he doesn’t notice my hand is shaking I shove it quickly into his grasp and clear my throat. “Two eight balls and a quarter of mushrooms,” I say. “Thank you,” I add afterward.

“Polite lady, I like it.” The man nods approvingly, pocketing the cash and nodding at a third man, a tall and skinny one in plaid who is sitting on a different couch with yet another dog. He gets up and heads into a back room.

“She’s Russian,” Tristan says, out of nowhere. I look at him, surprised, then back at Santiago, whose eyebrows are raised, then down at the floor. I just want this to be over. But Santiago asks me to sit down on the fraying corduroy couch next to him and I have no choice but to go.

“Russian, eh?” he asks me, reaching across the couch to cut up some lines of a white powder already lying on a silver platter among the old soda cans and bongs. “Any wise guys in your blood? Those fuckers are brutal.”

I lick my lips, take another big breath. “Not that I know of,” I say. “I do have an uncle who looks like Al Capone. People are always giving him better seats at places.”

“Ha!” Santiago says, almost smiling. He slaps his knee. “Fucking A. Other day I see a program about those spies back in the day, what you call them?”

“The KGB?”

He points at me and smiles. “Yeah, those fucking guys.” Then he shakes his head and repeats what he said before. “Brutal.” For a moment I think the guy isn’t half bad. But then he snorts a line of the powder up his nose with a rolled-up bill, and when he’s done, points at Tristan. “On the house, dude.”

“Oh, no, I’m good,” Tristan says.

“Come on,” Santiago says. “It ain’t fun to party alone. Get the fuck over here.”

“Nah,” Tristan repeats.

Santiago now eyes us both suspiciously, and Tristan starts doing the thing where he gets anxious and hops a little on his feet, until I give him a look to stop it.

“You must have a magic pussy to turn this guy straight,” Santiago says, with a mean laugh. He gives me the rolled-up dollar bill and implies that I take the line instead. I look at Tristan again. He’s standing perfectly still, not five feet away, but it may as well be an ocean.

I’ve had coke before, but I didn’t like it. It’s also hard to tell what this powder is. It could be heroin for all I know. If I believed in God, I would have prayed to him right then and there: not only that the coke wasn’t laced with something, but that if He let me out of this mess alive I’d never do drugs again. I would mean it, too. In my previous life I would refuse to put anything up my nose unless I knew where it came from and had seen others do it first. But there’s Tristan’s sobriety to uphold, so I take the bill and snort the next line like I have often done with Adderall. But this isn’t Adderall. Immediately, my entire body feels like I’ve injected coffee and happy pills straight into my brain.

“Pretty good stash, huh?” Santiago asks me. Then he waves Tristan over again. “Get the fuck over here, man, you’re making me nervous. Let’s have a good time already.”

Tristan ignores my pleading eyes and sits down on the floor. He snorts a line of the powder, then reaches over and drags a finger across some loose powder and rubs it on his gums.

“That’s a good boy,” the guy laughs, patting him on the back. “None of this sobriety shit in my house.”

Tristan stands up, shaking his head like he just swallowed something spicy. Still avoiding my eyes, he asks, “Dude, can I use your shitter?”

The guy turns to him with an appalled expression. “What do I look like, a preschool teacher?” he asks, shaking his head. “You gonna raise your hand to talk, amigo?”

Tristan lets out a small, tight laugh, then disappears into the hallway without looking at me. I try not to think about where he is going or what he is doing. If I do, I might pass out from worry. Plus, now that Tristan is gone, I have bigger concerns. Santiago moves closer to me on the couch, and keeps shoving the dollar bill in my hands. “I won’t bite,” he promises.

I have no choice but to take another sniff. Tristan is gone, and I can’t let this guy go looking for him because then we would be in even worse trouble than my being a little high. Even my skin is buzzing. In my mind, I am praying to a God I do not believe in to get us out in one piece. But my mind and body have separated.

I grab the bill. The powder burns my nose as it goes up, and the chemical aftertaste pools in my mouth a moment later. My heart rate, which was already faster than I’ve ever felt it, is now working overtime. My teeth feel numb and alive at the same time.

“How did you meet my amigo?” the guy asks then. He relaxes into the couch with his arms raised and wide. I’m so relieved he isn’t forcing me to do more drugs that I tell him the truth.

“At a horrible party,” I say. “He was there taking wallets.”

He seems amused by the story. “And what were you doing?” he asks, with a smirk.

“Looking for a friend of mine,” I explain. In any normal circumstance I would have shut up then, but the coke is making every thought in my brain flow out of my mouth. “My best friend. Margot. She kind of ditched me for this guy, and I hadn’t seen her in a while, and I wanted to talk to her about that and some other stuff, you know, but then I got there and she couldn’t even get off his lap for a second.” My mouth dry, I swallow my spit and catch my breath. “So I leave and she follows me out, but not to apologize or anything, to tell me she’s moving and we all have to find new apartments.” I start shaking my head now. I know I’m in a room of men who couldn’t care less about me and Margot’s problems, but for some reason it’s sort of a relief to get it off my chest. I hadn’t really thought about it since it happened. I’d relegated it to the back of my mind, along with everything else in my previous life, before my dad cut me off and Tristan swooped me up into his world. “And that was all after I found out my dad cheated on my mom and might have had another kid with her. She’s been messaging me from Ukraine.”