Tim Murphy - Christodora

“What is it?” he asked.

“I’m right back there again,” she said.

Mateo couldn’t avoid a moment of shame. He said nothing, but there was a beat when their eyes met, when she had to have seen his shame, and perhaps that helped him in the end, because it reminded her that he was human and not a heartless using machine.

But he didn’t nurse the moment. In fact, he said, rather coldly, “You know how good you’re going to feel in a second. Block everything else out. That’s what I do. In a second, it won’t matter.”

“Why’d you even come to L.A.?” she asked.

He looked at her and laughed, taking the loaded spike from her. “Why are you asking me that now?”

He was ready with his needle. He looked at her one more time. She was just looking at him blankly, openly, with DJ Khaled boasting and braying out of the speakers wired to the laptop. Just a fucking anonymous, hot, sunny, blank L.A. afternoon, in an anonymous apartment, in an anonymous part of town, with a next-to-anonymous girl. He was once again off the map; he could be anywhere in the world right now — and he was about to fly away, erase himself, and that was the best feeling in the world. The moment before was almost better than the actual doing. But then in went the spike. And then: Oh, the shudders! Oh, the violence inside him! Then: the fall, the fall, the fall. She was always there during the fall, 04/14/1984, the big 1980s hair pouf, the denim miniskirt, the leggings, the studded leather jacket. Why was this the only time she came to him?

Now he was deep in the fall. He didn’t know Carrie had watched him in horror and brutish, lustful jealousy. Or that, up to this minute, she’d reserved a tiny piece of her mind to walk away — to just run to the car and drive to her sponsor’s — a drive that might have led to disaster because her heart was racing, her whole body racked with chills and shakes. But now that she’d seen him like this, getting fucked by the H god, she wasn’t going anywhere, she needed it too badly herself.

A million miles away, he could feel her taking away his spike, undoing his belt. “Can you shoot me now?” he heard her say dimly, across a stratosphere. A hundred layers inside himself, he laughed. Can I shoot you now? Do I look like I can shoot you now? Fucking shoot yourself up. You’re straight and you’ve got everything you need. He felt tremendous gratitude, though — not to Carrie, who, again, was now many miles away, but to the simple state of being high again. He was relieved that that long period of eightysomething days of pretending that he didn’t want this. . well, that was only half true. He didn’t want this up until he ran out of energy to do what he needed to do to keep from doing this when he wanted this, which was, admittedly, a good deal of the time. He was just tired from the mental back-and-forth. On the floor, leaning against the bottom of her futon, he sank orgasmically forward into the Crouch. The Crouch! God, it felt so good to be back into the Crouch! And soon. . the Rocking!

“Mateo, can you please do me?” Carrie asked again. He reached for the belt and crouched toward her. He wasn’t computing time but his arm held the belt out, frozen, for thirty seconds before she finally took it from him and began tying herself off. Thank God! He crawled toward her and buried his head between her legs, her smell there mingling with his high and plunging him deeper into bliss, in slo-mo, the same way he’d watched his blood cloud back in the spike. God, how fucking gorgeous that was!

He mustered the energy to push open her legs and rest his open mouth over the crotch of her shorts while she readied her works — it was his way of telling her what she had to look forward to if she could just, could just, get over the moral hump and get herself high. He kept falling — it was the coming-true fantasy of falling down the endless rabbit hole without fear of the thud, the impact — while she did herself up, focused on the work. Then her shudders and tickles went through him, plunging into his own. Holy shit! Again with the delectable slo-mo, he felt his dick bloom to life, as it often did after he’d shot, not that he could ever have an orgasm in that state.

Mateo knew to wait until her shudders and shocks subsided and she was falling, crumpling forward. It felt like a million hours but, lying atop her, he took off her clothes, then his own, then, with the two of them like near-corpses on her sisal rug, he worked open her pussy with his fingers, then gentled in his blood-hard dick, taking the long, slow, mind-shatteringly excellent plunge inside.

She stretched her arms up and back on the rug, her crotch rising to push him inside as deep as he could go. “Mateo.” She said his name like a four-year-old. “Thank you, Mateo. You were right.”

He reached forward, held her hands bound over her head. He’d won. He felt powerfully evil, somewhere fathoms beneath his slo-mo bliss. He was still M-Dreem!

“I was right, baby,” he said, smashing her mouth down into the rug with his own, rising and falling on her like a weapon of destruction. Oh fuck, he thought, I shouldn’t have been born, but since I was, this is what I was put here to do. Spiking and fucking. He was delirious. For maybe twenty seconds, which felt like two hours, he felt that his body had melded with Carrie’s body, but now, even as he fucked her, more and more slowly, he felt himself soaring away from her in black space. It was all about him and that woman, their unholy alliance, him carrying on her whorish work of nothingness, until, when finally his head came up and he looked at Carrie, he saw instead her face from that snapshot and his own face, merged into one.

“Fucking God!” he gasped, shattering the slowness, leaping out of Carrie and off her body, flopping with a spasm on his back next to her, grabbing his dick for dear life.

“What is it?” Carrie said, but it was a drooling slur; she could barely fix her eyes on Mateo.

I think this H is cut with something, acid or X, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t — he just stared up at Carrie with the pleading, terrified eyes of a child, holding his dick.

“I feel something different, too,” she said. She climbed onto him, lowered herself, arched back and out of his view. She was having her revenge on him now. It went on and on. He flopped his head to the side so that the two of them, though joined at the center, could have been leagues away from each other, and he gave himself over to crying quietly. It felt cathartic and vivid amid the more numb bliss of the H high. He cried and cried, letting himself be a little baby, while she rode him, and the next thing he knew, she was nodding on top of him, with him still inside her.

Slowly, slowly, hearing the suck of the sweat around their groins, he pulled her off him. “Mateo!” she protested once, popping awake for about six seconds, before he gently shoved her onto the rug. He crawled toward his pants to retrieve his cell phone; he was feeling an incredible need for Hector, whose beat-up couch in that shithole apartment back in New York had become Mateo’s favorite place to nod before he went to rehab; Hector, too manic to be a true heroin fan, would watch over Mateo while tweaking on meth and ushering various visitors in and out of his back bedroom.

Mateo had gotten used to the tremendous feeling of safety of knowing that Hector was watching him as he nodded, and he missed it now and wanted to reach out to Hector, to see if he was in Palm Springs. He pulled out his cell phone, whose battery was nearly run down. There was a text from Drew: “Please come home or go to a hospital. At least text me back and tell me where you are. I love you.” There was a text from his sponsor: “What’s going on? You don’t have to do this, you know. You think you do, but you don’t. It’s as easy as calling me.” Mateo deleted them both. There were voice mails from them as well, but he deleted those without even listening.