Michelle Tea - Black Wave

She Is So Psyched The World Is Ending, Michelle observed. She Is So Psyched To Have Something Other Than Permit Parking To Get All Worked Up About.

Joey nodded thoughtfully. A lot of people’s lives are going to get a lot more meaningful — fast.

I Don’t Know What To Feel About It, Michelle admitted. It Doesn’t Feel Real.

Have you seen anybody die yet?

Michelle shook her head. Not Close Up. Just Television. And The Freeway, I Saw Some Crashes. Suicides, Michelle thought, but didn’t say it.

You ever see anyone die, ever?

Michelle shook her head.

My boyfriend OD’d when I lived in New York, Joey said, both of them lingering by the front window. We did all these things to try to save him. We threw him in the tub, we put ice on him, smacked him, shot him up with salt.

Salt?

Yeah, but none of it worked and he died. I watched him. It was crazy. One minute he was there, he wasn’t conscious but he was there, I knew he was there, and then, I could see it, he was gone. It fucking freaked me out so much. That it is that easy to leave like, just —Joey’s fingers twitched around in front of his face, as if casting some sort of spell, the spell of a person leaving themselves— like that, he said, insistent. He shook out his hands like they’d fallen asleep. Like that. Whatever keeps us here is hardly anything. We can all go like that, just like that. Joey looked about to cry. He stretched his eyes extra wide to prevent tears from spilling out. It was the same surprised expression he made to make fun of the women with too much plastic surgery who occasionally browsed the bookstore.

Oh, Joey. Michelle looked at her friend. The tears spilled despite his stricken expression. She put her hand on his bony wrist, but he lifted his hand away to pull the bandanna from his head and daub his eyes. Joey was beginning to go bald and didn’t quite know what to do about it, hence the bandanna. Michelle wouldn’t have known what to do about it either and felt grateful to never have to deal with such a thing. She supposed some women went nearly bald later in life, but Michelle wouldn’t be having a later life.

After Charley died I left. That exact night, I left. He died in the bathtub and I went back to my parents’ in Connecticut and I never went back to New York again, I have not been back since. I left him in that house, this girl’s house, Heidi, she didn’t know where to find me, no one knew where to find me, only Charley would have known, and I left him in the tub, ugh. He shivered, tied his bandanna back around his head, knotting it tight at the base of his skull. But it’s okay. He would have been okay with it. We both knew what we were doing. He’d left me at the hospital when I had my OD and didn’t get in touch with me till they released me, you know? That’s how it is with junkies.

Is That When You Stopped Doing It?

Joey shook his head. No, I did it for longer, sneaking around in my mother’s house. Can you imagine? I stopped when I came out here.

Me Too, Michelle said carefully.

You had a habit? Joey asked.

Michelle blushed, halted. Not Really, she said. Not Like That. We Never Shot. We Just Were Doing It Too Much. Not Enough To Get A Habit. I Don’t Think. Michelle couldn’t be sure. She always felt like shit in her body, even that day she was so nauseous from bad wine she didn’t know how she was going to ingest the apple and cottage cheese she had packed for lunch.

It’s so bad. Joey shook his head. So bad, so bad, so bad. But sooooo good. He looked out the window, like there was a giant boulder of heroin sitting on the sidewalk waiting for him to come and chip a chunk of it. I’m going to spend that last day so high, he said. I can’t fucking wait. He stood up and ruffled Michelle’s hair, his hand briefly catching on the total snarl of it. You’re in shock, babe.

I Am?

Totally. What are you going to do on the day it’s all over.

Michelle drew a blank. She shrugged. I Don’t Know.

Shock, Joey confirmed. You don’t really believe it’s happening.

Totally, Michelle affirmed. But if she knew she was in shock, was she still in shock? Was it like being crazy, how if you knew you were crazy you were somehow less crazy? I Don’t Know How To Believe It.

It will sink in, Joey promised. Once people start dying you’ll get it. Once you start seeing dead people. My upstairs neighbor jumped off the roof yesterday. It took her fifteen fucking hours to die. She just lay there in the back lot sort of wailing, like an animal. She’s wailing and my fucking housemates are fighting about flags. Your shock will wear off.

Michelle could feel a pull in the thinnest, gauziest layer of her denial, like a run in a pair of panty hose. Michelle stayed still for it, then shook it away. There was a vast, flat coldness underneath her denial. I Don’t Want The Shock To Wear Off, she told Joey.

Maybe it won’t. He shrugged. Maybe it’s up to you. He pushed through the door with a jangle, leaving Michelle alone in the dust and light and walls of books.

Every day the same sequence of events occurred within Michelle. She woke up hungover, totally sick inside her body. An alcohol hangover was normal, had been normal for years and years, but something had changed recently and the alcohol hangovers had become more brutal. Michelle trudged through intense nausea on her walk to work, the rise and fall of potential vomit mimicking the motion of her legs as she plodded sturdily onward. She never puked, but she always wondered if perhaps she should.

Arriving at the bookstore she opened the door with her key and did what she was paid to do. She flicked on all the lights. She turned on the cash register. She positioned herself behind the wheeled wooden cart holding the ten-cent paperbacks, the books bought against your better judgment when you could no longer endure the performance of a haggling junkie. You bought the thing for a quarter then sold it out front for a dime. Michelle wondered how the store even stayed in business with such practices, she presumed the trade of first-edition Norman Mailers on the Internet was what paid her paltry paycheck.

The dime cart was terribly heavy, especially with Michelle so weakened from drinking. It would take her forever to push it out the door, books tumbling to the sidewalk — the sun, insistent and deadly, the torturing dictator of a third world country, shining on her, turning her cells against her with its radiation. Michelle would feel faint by the end of it. She would retreat into the kiosk and stick her head between her knees, her entire body whirling beyond her control, dizziness and nausea and intense dehydration, the dew of her sweat coating her skin clammily while her throat, so dry, caught on itself like Velcro, choking her. Weak from not eating, her nerves jagged with coffee, her eyes blurred, dulled from the brightness outside, tearing from allergies or something, who knows, who knows what was wrong with Michelle. Maybe she was dying. Everyone had cancer. Michelle had had little spots removed from her body years ago, a recipient of the free health care San Francisco gave to the poor. A doctor at the charity clinic had frozen the moles scattered across her skin and sliced them off with a sharp little tool. Michelle felt like a dumpstered vegetable, good enough if you just cut the rot away. She thought of Stitch, how Stitch should get it together and go to medical school, get paid for cutting people with sharp little razors. Mornings in the bookstore, her body gone psychedelic with sickness, Michelle wished someone would come and cut away the problem within her, whatever it was.