Hiroku

by Laura Lascarso

  The party continued on. I drifted away from Seth in order to properly thank my Hilliard colleagues for showing up and for their contribution to the video. Then I got caught up with Caleb who’d come out to support Mitchell. Sasha wanted to come, but she had finals. They’d gotten back together. “She’s crazy, but she’s mine,” Caleb said with a rueful smile. He asked me if I could believe that Mitchell was going to be a father, which would make him an uncle. He shook his head in disbelief. I told him I thought they’d both do a pretty good job at it, and I meant it.

  It was late by the time I realized I hadn’t seen Seth in a while. I started looking around the house for him, then outside on the patio where the kegs were set up. I was heading up the stairs when Tish intercepted me and asked to show me her art portfolio for a class she was taking. After giving her a bit of feedback about what pieces I thought were her strongest, I told her that I had to find Seth.

  Tish placed a hand on my shoulder and said gently, “Stay with me, Hiroku.” Her soft hand on my arm and the tone of her voice, which was like a lullaby—it wasn’t for herself but for me. Seth was up to no good, and he’d sent Tish to distract me.

  “Where is he, Tish?” I asked in a voice I didn’t know I had but reminded me a lot of my father. She only sighed and glanced back toward the stairs.

  I tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and banged open every door like a one-man SWAT team. And here I am embarrassed to admit what I found because it is such a fucking cliché that it is almost unbelievable. But, here goes…

  I found Seth in the master bath, shirtless, snorting lines off the bare, hairless chest of a boy about my age. The kid was laid out like a sacrifice on a waist-high countertop wearing nothing but his underwear, and even though he wasn’t the same guy, he looked remarkably like the kid with the cornflower-blue eyes I’d found Seth getting head from roughly a year ago—Seth’s type when he felt like cheating, I supposed.

  They had fucked or were about to fuck or would fuck in the near future. But even more maddening was that Seth had broken his other promise to me, the one where he swore to stay off the hard drugs, and then I realized he might have gone back to using the very next day after our camping trip because you can’t trust an addict. I knew that fact from experience.

  As we stared at each other from across the room. Lifetimes passed, his and mine. All of the trust we’d built up over the past few weeks since making our pact evaporated right in front of my eyes like lines being snorted up your nose. Here and then not. My eyes stung, and my bottom lip felt fat and clumsy as I bit down hard enough to draw blood because I’d be goddamned if I was going to cry.

  “And so it goes,” I said, utterly defeated.

  Seth wiped his freshly powdered nose with the back of his hand and smacked his latest kill on the thigh in a motion to hop to. Seth’s hand so casually slapping that boy’s flesh gutted me. The boy scrambled up, put his pants on, and seemed about to leave, but Seth ordered him to stay.

  “We could share him,” Seth said to me, and it pissed me off because it seemed like further proof that he didn’t know me at all.

  “Only if he can fuck me,” I said, calling his bluff.

  Seth would never allow it. Getting head from another guy, maybe, but he’d never willingly let another man penetrate me. Seth glared at me, and that deranged look was in his eyes. I could taste his tang of aggression in the air. Maybe he would hit me. Seth’s fists or his words, I couldn’t bring myself to care which.

  “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” Seth asked. “Getting railed by another man. Fucking Fabio with his perfect teeth. That biker at Eileen’s. God only knows who else…”

  I shook my head. There was never anyone else, but I didn’t feel compelled to reassure him now.

  “I could never be good enough for you, Hiroku, could I? No matter how rich or famous, I’d always be beneath you.”

  I tore my eyes away from him. “I don’t give a shit about any of that, Seth, and you know it.”

  “Don’t you though? With your nuclear family and your perfect attendance record and your daddy’s money. You never understood how hard it was for me growing up.”

  I dragged my hands over my face, wishing he would just stop. I couldn’t believe he’d resort to this. “I tried to understand, Seth.” I jammed my thumbs into my eye sockets. God, how I’d tried.

  “Who are you to judge me? You were nothing when I met you. Just some dorky kid with a cheap camera and a furry hand.”

  I was a kid. A stupid, foolish kid, and two years later, I’d learned nothing because there I was in the same exact place, experiencing more or less the same devastation. Shame on me.

  “I made you, Hiroku,” Seth raved. “I fucking molded you from nothing. From fucking mud. And now you’re an artist, thanks to me. You should be grateful to me for turning your boring, ordinary suburban life into something special, but instead, you constantly look for ways to punish and deny me and remind me of what a piece of shit I am.”

  “You really believe that?” I wished I could say it was only the drugs talking, but they also had a way of unearthing truths you’d rather keep buried. For him to think I existed as a mirror to only reflect his flaws...

  “Your love always comes with conditions,” Seth hissed. “You’ve never loved me with your whole heart, Hiroku. Never.”

  He said the word “never” with so much vehemence and hatred that I couldn’t stop the tears. Couldn’t stop the pain either, welling up inside me. Filling up my organs, shutting me down. God, it hurt. And the idea that if only I’d loved him more, accepted him without conditions, then this awful end might have been avoided. “I did love you, Seth. You know that I did.”

  “That’s right. In the Before.” He narrowed his eyes at me, then snapped his fingers. Seth’s hot piece of ass jumped to like a trained monkey and came to stand by his side.

  “Meet Cory.” Seth ran his hand lovingly over the boy’s shoulder and down his arm. The boy shivered. He must be high. It looked so familiar and so grotesque. “Say hello to Hiroku, Cory.”

  “Hello,” Cory said with a nervous hitch. With his Texas drawl and shaky confidence, Cory was as innocent as a lamb.

  What a pleasure it would be to corrupt you, Seth had said to me so many months ago. I didn’t know what was more upsetting—that my heart was hemorrhaging right there in front of him or that Seth seemed to be enjoying it.

  “You want to go on tour with me and the rest of Petty Crime, Cory?” Seth asked in a sickly-sweet tone.

  Cory’s eyes brightened, and he grinned. “Sure thing,” he said only it sounded like shore thang. I hated his accent, hated his naivety, and I hated his willingness to do whatever Seth wanted. He reminded me so much of myself.

  “Cory’s ready to go on the road with me, and we’ve only known each other for twenty minutes, but not you, Hiroku. Not you.”

  Seth shook his head and wagged his finger at me while tears brimmed in my eyes. Some part of me believed I deserved this, because I couldn’t commit to Seth in the way he wanted. But why did he have to do this? Why did he have to be so goddamned mean?

  “Well,” I said with a defeated sigh. “It looks like you found yourself a new number one groupie. Congratulations, Seth. Thank you for putting an exclamation point on this remarkably shitty relationship.”

  Seth smiled, the corners of his mouth drawing up in an almost clownish expression. I wasn’t sure exactly what he’d snorted because he looked positively possessed. “It will never be over between us, Hiroku. Our souls are forever bound. When I call for you, you come to me. I made you—every single piece of you belongs to me—and however hard you try, you will never be rid of me.”

  He was fucking with me—he had to be—but even knowing that didn’t decrease the potency of his threat. As irrational as it sounds, I even suspected some kind of sorcery had taken place. Seth dabbled in the occult.

  As if sensing my vulnerability, Seth continued, “Who are you without me? You’re not interesting or speci
al. You’re not even that attractive. I make you special. I make you desirable. The only reason those other men want you is because they know you’re mine. Without me, you’re nothing.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. I shouldn’t believe his words, but he’d voiced the fear I’d always carried with me like a virus lying dormant in my bloodstream—that I wasn’t enough. Seth had activated it, and it was multiplying out of my control.

  “I’ll take that risk,” I said defiantly.

  Seth shook his head, a rueful smile on his face. “You’re too weak to be alone.” He made a motion with his hand to dismiss me. “Go home and wait for me. You can make me feel bad about this later. This is my night, and I won’t have you ruin it for me the way you ruin everything else.”

  Then he drew his newest plaything close to him and kissed him full on the lips while gripping his ass from behind. Seth thrust his hips a little and moaned for my benefit. I watched because the masochist in me couldn’t look away. “He tastes just like you,” Seth said and licked his lips.

  Those were his last words to me.

  I fled from the bathroom like a kicked puppy, stopping just outside the master bedroom door where I bent over with my hands on my knees and tried to pull myself together. I might have been hyperventilating. I just needed to get out of the party without anyone seeing me fall apart—the other emotions could be dealt with later—but as I was rising up to a standing position, James was making his way toward me.

  “Where’s Seth?” James asked, and I could only guess at why he’d come. Seth’s remora, always swimming just a little behind to feed on Seth’s scraps.

  And then everything that had been culminating over the past several months passed by me like tumbleweed. I’d tried leaving Seth, tried setting boundaries, I’d followed him down to his darkest depths, and when that didn’t work, I tried to bring us both back up to the surface. But none of it mattered because there I was still trapped in this emotional hell, existing only to be manipulated and abused, and I couldn’t even trust myself not to go running back to him for more. Seth would keep me on standby like a vampire’s old frozen dinner and bleed me until there was nothing left.

  I had a terrible impulse then.

  I wasn’t entirely powerless. I could still escape this pain, and I could make Seth pay for what he’d done to me on my way out. In that moment, nothing else mattered, save for my own personal revenge.

  I pulled out my wallet, which was flush with cash from the profits of the video where I’d laid my soul bare for everyone’s viewing pleasure. It was a performance, only I wasn’t acting. I worshipped him. I made sacrifices for him. I may not have loved him unconditionally, but I loved him the best way I knew how. And for what?

  “How much does Seth owe you?” I asked James the Nazi.

  James eyed me in the way he usually did. “I only make the exchange with Seth.”

  “He’s tied up at the moment, securing our entertainment for later tonight.”

  James tilted his head like that was news to him. “It’s like that, huh?”

  “How much?” I repeated. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  “How about this?” James suggested, relaxing a little in his stance like he was settling in for the long haul. “You blow me, and I’ll give it to you for half price.”

  It never ceased to amaze me what stripe of folk would proposition me for a blowjob, but then Seth had always said my mouth was made for fucking.

  “What the fuck, James? You’re, like, the biggest homophobe ever.”

  “Head is head,” he said simply, “and from what I saw, you look to be pretty good at it.”

  I refrained from physically gagging at his offer. “How about this? You give it to me half price, and I won’t tell Seth you tried to trade me sex for drugs.”

  James shrank back a little at that suggestion. Some part of Seth’s reputation for being a jealous lover must have reached him because it seemed he didn’t want to go any farther down that path. We made the trade. James assured me he’d given me a good deal, even though I wasn’t an expert on the exchange rate of heroin—if that was even what it was. I did know that it was a lot of product, which meant Seth wasn’t just planning on getting high that night. Seth always did like to buy in bulk, I thought bitterly.

  James also told me there were plenty of queers in the movement and that Japan was the model of an ethnostate. I told him fascism was not a good look for him. Then he left, via the cold dark portal to hell from whence he came.

  I clutched the baggie in my fist. It was almost the size of a golf ball. Nothing good could come of it.

  NOW

  You know how when you’re a kid and one of your parents pisses you off, so you envision all kinds of scenarios to get back at them? Running away, for instance, or being stricken with an incurable disease. You imagine yourself laid up in some hospital bed with tubes running through your body like freeways. “If only you’d let me have that first-person shooter video game,” you’d tell them, already so weakened by the sickness that you only have the strength to utter those final, damning words.

  That will teach them.

  I did what I did because I wanted to hurt Seth. I wasn’t even thinking about my own safety or well-being. I was consumed by my desire for revenge. I wanted him to feel even a fraction of the pain I was feeling.

  It’s a little frightening to think about how readily I took that plunge. It wasn’t even that hard of a decision to make because there was so little left of me by then. Seth was a roaring house fire, and I was a match, burnt-up.

  What makes me so mad now, is that if I had succeeded, it would have been just one more thing I’d given to him.

  THEN

  I asked Mitchell for the keys to the Malibu. I’d ridden my motorcycle to the party, and Seth had his van keys, but the Malibu felt like a fitting place to sever our bond because it was such a large part of the Before.

  Mitchell asked me if I was okay.

  “I drank too much. Just want to sleep it off a bit before I get on my bike.”

  He gave me a concerned look, but in true Mitchell fashion, didn’t ask questions. Instead, he gave me his keys and told me not to pass out on my back and choke on my own vomit. Also, not to barf in his backseat. I chuckled like that was a funny joke.

  After some trouble because it was dark and I was emotional, I found the Malibu. I wondered if Mitchell and Jeannie would sell it or trade it in for something more reliable. I imagined them with a kid, and even though I was, for the most part, a pessimist, I thought perhaps they could make it as a family, especially if they were working together to raise a child. Didn’t parenthood have the potential to bring out the best in people?

  I climbed into the backseat and pulled up an old playlist on my phone from when Seth and Mitchell schooled me in the ways of rock ‘n’ roll. It was a mix of all of our favorites—Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Black Mountain and more. I listened to “Tonight, Tonight” and remembered that fateful camping trip to McKinney Falls when I told Seth he sang like a fallen angel.

  You mean like Satan? he’d said with an affectionate chuckle.

  If you looked at our relationship from very far away, like through a telescope, where you could only see a small sliver of it, it was so very beautiful. And perhaps that was what I was attempting to remedy. In my quest for the truth, I wanted to expose the ugly underbelly of what we’d been through, what an all-consuming love and obsession could accomplish. Perhaps this would be my final work of performance art. Seth could even write a song about it. I’d always been his inspiration, his muse, and the band’s number one groupie, so why would this be any different?

  But he would suffer, that much I knew. As cruel and vicious as he’d been to me just a little while ago, his soul would ache for me. Maybe not when he was onstage basking in the applause. Maybe not when he was seducing some pretty young thing into his bed. But on the nights when he was lonely, and no a
mount of drugs or sex or music could fill that gaping hole inside of him, he’d yearn for me.

  And that was enough.

  I cut up some lines using an old CD case of Mitchell’s as a surface and my Austin Public Library card as an edge. I wasn’t careful about dosage. I didn’t give a shit. I would get high until I couldn’t anymore, so even after the initial three lines, I cut up three more, and three more after that. I don’t know how many lines I snorted because shortly after, I lost consciousness.

  I remembered thinking as I faded away, wouldn’t my skin make a beautiful rug for Seth’s apartment?

  NOW

  In all the secrets I’ve disclosed to Dr. Denovo, there is one confession I have not made. It’s that my overdose wasn’t an accident. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to tell him that. Even with all that I’ve shared, I don’t want him to think less of me for it. Fucked up, I know, but we live in a culture of vicious shame.

  I won’t tell anyone, ever. It’s a secret I’ll take to my grave. Only one other person could guess at what I was trying to accomplish that night.

  And fuck him.

  THEN

  I woke up in an ambulance, jarred awake by a shot of Narcan, confused and sick and surrounded by strangers. I was disoriented for most of the ride to Seton Medical Center, but my first coherent thought was that even in this attempt, I had failed. My second thought was that my parents were going to find out. The transfer to a hospital room gave me some time to figure out what the hell I was going to say to them. As the medical staff was moving me, I saw Sabrina turn a corner and come running toward me, but I couldn’t remember seeing her at the party.

  “Your parents are on their way,” she said to me as though it was supposed to be reassuring. I wanted to ask her what had happened, but they told her to wait outside of my room until my parents arrived.

  The withdrawal was coursing through me, stronger than ever before. The shot must have reverse-engineered the drugs to make them start attacking me. I asked the nurse for something to take the edge off. Instead, she gave me a snotty look and told me I was lucky to be alive.