by Liz Worth
I get it all down. Aimee sits across from me, asks if I’m tired. I lean my head against the wall to keep the room from spinning away.
- 15 -
CHINATOWN
Cam’s guests are gone but they left behind for us their coughs, curtains of phlegm shaking deep in the caves of newly infected chests.
I cannot fight, my immunity thin, flailing. New bacteria sits under the skin, threatening a scratched throat, burnout and maximized exhaustion.
Beneath the shouts of wet lungs are Tara’s sobs. She’s been crying in a corner for hours, riding a hard craving since Trevor told her there wasn’t any grayline left.
My head hasn’t moved from the spot on the wall it’s rested on since Aimee last fed me. I can’t hold this pose a cigarette longer.
Aimee’s down to her last smoke and the latest care package didn’t have any packs inside. We ride all the way to Mike’s on the strength of peanut butter sandwiches.
“I want you to tell me something this time,” Mike says, lips against my ear. My body reacts with a shiver and I hate myself for it.
“What do you want to know?” I ask. He sighs, like he’s thinking very hard about this. I feel his chest and belly expand against me, filling the curve of my spine.
“Tell me a story,” he says.
I tell him about how me and Aimee used to fall into masses of oblivion, how sometimes at the Mission we could be raised overhead by crowds of hands, cresting over droning feedback. My body always moved like it had been through this before, had the familiarity of being saved. Aimee’s stayed stiffer, on guard, braced for the floor as she sailed towards the stage, the soles of her Docs blurring over skulls, delicate faces. And around me, in the audience, bodies shook in time to a one-two beat, faces held high in salute to a boy whose face was red, a boy who screamed and screamed for us.
One night we were outside, between sets. The buzz of the last band had gotten in our ears, followed us everywhere. We didn’t know this was called tinnitus. We thought we were just meant for it, made for it. That the music sunk into us, that we kept it alive.
It was December, two nights before Christmas. Half a foot of snow had fallen since we’d gotten to the Mission but it was too hot inside with all the energy buzzing around. Half the club had crowded onto the sidewalk, staining ice crystals with their boots and cigarette butts. Half the filth of the city stamped on a single corner.
Against the wall, a girl holding her hair, holding half of herself up. In my head it felt like it should already be two in the morning. A circle had formed in front of the stage. A group of guys were using the bare floor to slip onto their tailbones and slide on the studs of their thick silver belts. Their girlfriends laughed each time they went down, and the circle got wider each time someone’s drink got spilled.
Above us, the last band sounded tired. Old. We were bored. It was the last show of the year. Aimee was staying at her cousin’s house then. Her cousin and her husband were older, and they’d invited her to stay for a couple weeks over Christmas. She asked if I wanted to come back with her that night, sleepover. There was a liquor cabinet, she promised, and Christmas wine, gifted and opened for early guests, leftover on the kitchen counter and in the side door of the fridge.
We snuck beers out of the club to drink on the ride out to the city’s furthest edge. Aimee’s cousin lived an hour away by public transit, a single streetcar ride but a long one in bad weather. The snow that night, it kept falling. A foot on the ground by last call.
The house was a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest streetcar stop. When we got off, the snow was untouched. At the city limits, it was easy to take one step outside at night and believe, entirely, that you were the only person left in the world.
Winter wetness got into the tops of our boots, chilled the steel toe caps. The front of our jeans were packed white. I slipped, came down hard on a patch of black ice. My beer bottle, still half-full, shattered in my parka pocket, and the smell of it instantly dripped through. Aimee, drunk, dipped her hand into my coat and scooped out a fistful of glass, kept walking. The next day my ass would be bruised, an entire cheek tinted blue, but Aimee’s hand was perfectly intact, not a scratch of crimson marring the palm.
At the house we helped ourselves to half a bottle of red, half a bottle of white, and a box of chocolates, all already opened. Aimee only ate two candies but I couldn’t stop, not even when I felt them solidify at the back of my throat, a globule of sugar I could scarcely push through.
We had to smoke outside. We were wasted by the time of our last smoke of the night, a necessary ritual to keep the nicotine levels going to sleep through eight hours.
I shivered in my parka, its lower half still wet from the busted beer. Aimee wobbled, could barely stand. I asked if I could brush my teeth. To get the sugar off, at least. Aimee said to use her toothbrush, pointed the way to the bathroom on her way up the stairs.
The lights were off in the bedroom when I got there, Aimee already passed out. The smell of beer clung all around us.
In the morning the middle of my calf was streaked with a light russet trail of dried Labatt 50. I swung myself out of bed. Beside me, Aimee stayed still. She was always at her heaviest in her sleep.
My legs were bare but my parka was still wrapped around my shoulders, bunched at the wrists. Beneath the covers, a wealth of brown glass glinted.
Mike gives us each a pack of smokes and a mickey of gin. Aimee asks if he knows where we can get any grayline but all he says is, “Maybe, but I’d stay away from that stuff.”
“Too late,” we tell him, assuming his maybe means yes.
We ride back through Chinatown and see a restaurant with people in it.
“Wow,” Aimee says, slowing down across the street. “It looks like it’s open, like they’re serving.”
We’re both hungry again.
“Let’s go,” Aimee says.
Cam and Trevor heard rumours of a few restaurants that never closed, surviving on old grease, dried fat and rain water for boiling the meat of feral cats and stray dogs, just like those urban legends of Chinese restaurants that were serving lost pets in their chow mein.
We are more restless than wary. Hunger is secondary, but it’s pushing through as soon as the smell of food hits us. Stomachs growl. The warmth of a steaming counter cuts through the dampness of the day. There are five other people seated at tables, two men in the window and three in a corner. They eye us but keep their chins to their plates.
The menu is sparse. Most of it has been blacked out by marker, leaving noodles, rice, and meat. We order the noodles and pay in cigarettes, five each.
Aimee leans back in her chair and slides her boots off, puts her feet in my lap. Her socks have turned grey and her toes flash pink through the holes in their tops.
No one in the restaurant talks. There is no music playing in the background, no buses chugging by outside. Without the voices of others filling in the blanks for us, we cautiously stretch into the void as two steaming bowls slide in front of us. The noodles glisten between chopsticks, slide out of the slick grip, and eventually I give up and grab for a chunk of the lavender-grey meat that’s been laid overtop.
“I didn’t know this came with meat,” Aimee says. She turns to the counter. “Excuse me? Excuse me?” The cook looks up but doesn’t smile. “Excuse me? What kind of meat is this?” The cook looks down, shakes his head, worries a cloth over an imaginary spot on the counter.
The meat squishes between my teeth. Bland juice squirts across my tongue.
Aimee is rolling a piece of meat around in her mouth, face hesitant. Whatever it is, she doesn’t want to let it inside of her and instead spits it down the side of the table, onto the floor. If anyone notices, they don’t say anything.
A rush of saliva helps me get mine down, even though I immediately regret swallowing it and wish I had done like Aimee.
“I wonder if this is where the wild dogs end up when they die,” she asks, tackling a strand of white in her bo
wl.
Aimee and I clamp our noodles and slurp at the same time. They are salt and rubber, tunneling bodies squirming on tongues. Our bowls are full of worms, wriggling. Over my shoulder, the two men in the corner lift their last mouthfuls, long white noodles hanging limp.
“I can’t eat this,” I say.
Aimee’s already pushed hers away. She waits at the counter while I walk to the washroom, hoping for water, just something to splash my face with. The stench keeps me from getting both feet inside. The toilet is full to the top, floating with brown and yellow. Gobs of toilet paper have soaked into a deep gold along the top. In front of it, a tall red bucket, it too full of human water and waste. Around the back and base of the toilet are low piles of old bunches of toilet paper and napkins and torn newspaper pages, all smeared with dried shit.
I could gag but trace amounts of remaining grayline won’t let me. It keeps the throat and esophagus as tight and tense as the rest of the body, everything on high alert.
Aimee is already outside, waiting by our bikes. We zigzag between lines of dead cars along Spadina Avenue, coasting tight between their warts of rust. They’ll slice you good, those cars.
We stop on the porch of a torched house and break into the gin. The smokes are fresh, for once, and the first drags hit us as if they’re the first ones we’ve had all day. Aimee tests her weight on the wooden boards before lying all the way back. We keep the bottle tucked between us, in case anyone passes by and asks for a sip. Not that we’ve seen anyone since the restaurant, but you never know. We’re three shots in, each, when we hear, “Hey!”
We sit up too fast. Heads rush, underlining an early buzz. We look ahead but see no one.
“Hey!” It comes again. “Up here.”
An arm waves from a window next door, a dirty blonde head calling us over. “Me and my sister are dying to talk to someone else,” she says. “We’ve been stuck with each other for days.”
The two girls lie together on the same bed. Close up the dirty blonde looks like she might be younger than I thought. Her hair’s streaked with grease and she’s left her blue denim shirt unbuttoned. A plain white bra underneath is striped with dark yellow sweat.
“I’m Carla. This is Jenna,” she says, pointing to the darker haired girl. They don’t look like sisters at all. Jenna’s hair is thick, wavy, her skin a deeper tone than Carla’s.
Carla pulls something out of her shirt pocket that looks like a joint. She lights it up with a wooden match but when it starts to blaze it doesn’t smell like pot. More like incense—cinnamon and jasmine. She offers me a pull. Its taste is mild and white, like chalk.
“What is this?” I ask.
Carla shrugs. “Our roommate got it for us. I can’t remember what it’s called.” She looks at Jenna for help, but Jenna just stares ahead, doesn’t even make an effort to answer. “I think he said it was called ‘ashelle.’ Whatever it is, it’s good. Better than weed.”
“Yeah,” Jenna says, finally.
Carla laughs at her sister. “The ashelle’s on her, that’s why she’s so quiet.”
It must be on me, too, because everything Carla says makes her sound like she talking through an underwater helmet.
Sweat’s collected along Aimee’s upper lip. I thirst for it, lean into her. She lets me stay on her face.
When I pull away, Carla’s face has split sideways she’s grinning so wide. “The ashelle’s on you, too,” she says, and rubs Aimee’s back. “Just go with it,” she says, over and over.
Rare for Aimee to have a bad trip, I’d told Carla when it hit. I think of the mickey in my bag, wondering if the alcohol had anything to do with it.
“It’s a good buzz, right?” Carla asks Aimee. I know what she’s doing: mind control, hypnosis of the trip. It’s an old trick but one we’ve all had to use before.
Since my kiss with Aimee my mouth has been secreting salt, limbs threatening seizure. I want another shot but don’t want to share. Just because Carla gave something to us doesn’t mean we have to do the same.
“It’s a good buzz,” Aimee says.
I manage to count the spark of matches around me. Eight cigarettes later, at six minutes a cigarette, must be bringing us to close to an hour into this buzz. The salt in my mouth has mostly been swallowed. My vision is something less than blind. I sit up.
“Now you’ll really start to feel good,” I hear Carla say to Aimee.
Finally, Aimee asks, “Do you want to get out of here?” and I realize I’d been waiting for those words, because, yes, I do.
Back at the house there’s a girl grinding Cam’s crotch. Me and Aimee are still buzzing, but we can’t tell if it’s from whatever it was we smoked earlier, or if it’s from the rest of the mickey we killed on the way back.
Every voice in the house is amplified. “Want to go to the third floor?” Aimee asks.
No one’s been to the third floor since Brandy and Camille were up there. The windows are stained glass, smaller than the windows in the rest of the house. The light seems only to hit the blue panes, holding everything in frosted incandescence. I have to duck my head under the low ceiling, wonder if the walls are shrinking in on us.
Aimee wobbles to the center of the room and flops to the floor. Her eyes roll around in their sockets too slowly, like someone’s poured syrup all over them. She lights a cigarette and exhales a dragon cloud of smoke. With her head tilted back I can see gaps where she’s missing teeth. Must be recent, those losses. Mine aren’t loose yet, but they will be soon enough.
“So this is it,” Aimee says. I can tell she’s fighting to focus her eyes on the corners of the room to watch for moving shadows.
Tara comes up the stairs. “You two were gone forever,” she says.
“Really? How long?” I ask. The words are slower in my mouth than they should be.
Tara doesn’t answer. Instead, “Look what I got off Cam.” She holds out a joint. I can smell the weed. It’s the real thing.
“Really? He gave that to you?”
“Well, no, not really. I took it from him,” she says. “So don’t tell, k?”
She lights up and inhales, bends close to offer her mouth and breathe it all into my lungs. Her legs are bare, glowing blue in the light of the room as she shifts towards Aimee to pass her the joint.Aimee barely registers. Tara shrugs and sits back beside me.
“You fucked up or what?” she says.
But before I make a move to answer, a wing sprouts from Tara’s leg. It starts with dark brown stems and then pops out turquoise tips, white feathers freckled with grey and black. Tara doesn’t move, too busy holding smoke in her chest. The wing is long enough for it to beat against the floor. It flaps until it falls off of Tara’s leg, becomes bodiless, independent.
This is when I decide to go back downstairs.
The pot smoke’s brought the noise level down from where it was when I first got here. Cam’s still with the girl, says her name is Melanie. He found her hanging around outside and invited her in. He likes to believe he’s saving people sometimes. I can tell by looking at her she’s the kind of girl who’s always bumming cigarettes without bothering to remember your name. Wonder she’s made it alive this long.
Cam says, “Melanie’s gonna stay with us tonight.”
Brandy’s been too sick to speak lately but now she steps up, her studded jacket clanking. “Just tonight though right, Cam?” she says from the door.
We all maintain unspoken rules. Visitors are fine, but they can’t live here. We’ve only got so much. One extra person means less moldy bread to go around.
“I told you to get off my case,” Cam says.
Brandy pulls half her face behind the doorframe and glares, but it’s Melanie’s face that’s red, gone timid.
“I have a place you know,” Melanie says, the statement only vaguely directed at the room. “I was just gonna crash because, you know, Cam asked me, that’s all.”
Aimee interrupts any further conversation by walking in. Her eyes are so
glazed they could leak. Her hand is out, extended for Melanie’s. The girl’s hand stays limp but her eyes are wired to the pointed bone of Aimee’s wrist, the fox skull tattooed over her veins. Neither of them offer their names. No one else offers introductions.
Aimee pulls me onto her lap and wraps her legs around my back. My throat is still tender from the drugs upstairs but I can’t stop another wave of high from hitting me and then every inch of potential noise that’s left in the city is collecting in a single building—our house—and we’re building it all, breathing it all in through thick droplets of air, me and Aimee in one corner admiring the oiled silk of our dirty hair, the way hers glints gold and red and mine casts snow even in the thud of light, and in another corner, Cam’s got a semicircle going around the back of the room and the only word they keep saying is survival survival survival survival survival until it’s a prayer, a practice in hypnosis. And Brandy and Carrie are still wearing their studded jackets, playing the same song over and over, a chant in counterbalance to Cam’s, the Exploited hurling sex and violence and sex and violence and sex and violence from a tinny boombox and I can’t believe someone’s salvaged batteries just for that because I always hated that song but love it right now because the sounds we thought would be with us always, in either world, old or new or dying, couldn’t follow us here because so many of us forgot to save things like batteries or ran them down too early. And everything gets louder and louder between the walls that we’ve declared to be ours until we own what we believe, in this moment, to be the last wall of sound that will ever exist and we are responsible for it and we are responsible for it and we are responsible for it.
We lose time, like usual, and speculate about UFOs: alien abduction, identity theft, physical probing into supernatural phenomenon of the six-six-sixth senses.
Melanie hasn’t slept since she got here. You can smell it on her, the night sweat that clings to sleeplessness and burnout. If she’s overstayed her one-night welcome none of us know for sure.