A Cure for Night

by Justin Peacock

  "What're we actually talking about in terms of drugs?"

  "Heroin," I said. "And that wasn't all of it. I had someone, a young woman, a person from my firm, whom I did it with. She OD'd."

  "OD'd as . . . ?"

  "She died, yes. In the firm's library bathroom. It was a bit of a scandal."

  "Shit, Joel," Myra said. "You're a badass motherfucker."

  We laughed, cautiously, then descended into silence. Myra had again picked out songs on the jukebox, and the music abruptly shifted from The Clash's "Guns of Brixton" to an acoustic song by Aimee Mann.

  I propped my window up and then

  I turned my back to lure you in

  To rifle through what I might have been

  "So what actually happened?" Myra asked.

  "I don't like talking about this stuff with people."

  "I'm not a roomful of strangers drinking bad coffee in a church basement," Myra said. "Tell me what happened."

  And so I did.

  I'D CALLED Beth at home a week or so after the night when she'd first told me about her using. I wasn't calling out of curiosity about heroin, though I supposed that was there, but rather out of lust. I'd called her from my office on a night when I was working late. It didn't make a lot of sense on one level—we spoke at work a couple of times a day—but I wasn't about to ask her out within the transparent confines of the firm.

  Beth sounded amused but not surprised by my call. I'd made the briefest possible small talk, then asked her if she was free that Friday.

  "Why?" Beth had said. "What did you have in mind?"

  "I figured we could play it by ear," I said.

  "Are you calling from work?" Beth asked.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Okay then," Beth said. "I guess we'll leave it at that."

  WE HADN'T talked about it during the rest of the week at work, interacting as we always had. I suspected there was a lilt of self-consciousness, or perhaps self-parody, to our banter now.

  On Friday the forecast was for a severe winter storm, perhaps even a blizzard. By the time I left Walker's Midtown office to take the subway uptown to Beth's apartment in Morningside Heights, the sky was thick with drifting snowflakes.

  It was snowing even worse by the time I got there, ankle-deep and growing, dancing through the air in angry gusts. I trudged the two blocks to her apartment through piles and drifts.

  When I rang Beth's buzzer there was no response. I pulled out my cell phone and was dialing her number when Beth walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. She was wearing a peacoat without a hat or scarf, her hair covered with snow.

  "What're you doing out here?" I said.

  "I was doing some last-minute shopping before the blizzard," Beth said, walking past me and opening her building's front door.

  Beth's studio apartment was both cluttered and dirty, old newspapers and magazines on the floor, dishes stacked in the sink. It reminded me of how I'd lived in my very first apartment, as a sophomore in college.

  "The maid's week off?" I said as I shook snow from my coat.

  "I was going to tidy up," Beth said, plopping down on her futon. "But then I didn't."

  "So what kind of shopping were you doing this time of night?" I asked, sitting on the swivel chair by her desk.

  "You're the kind of person who always has to know, aren't you, Joel? I bet you think your curiosity knows no bounds."

  "It hasn't come up against them yet."

  With a small sigh and a lift of her hips Beth reached into the front pocket of her jeans, drew something out, and handed it over to me. Upon inspection it proved to be several things: identical white packets that looked like miniature envelopes. The same words were stamped in bleeding ink upon each: Lethal Injection.

  "Is this what I think it is?" I asked.

  "Do I know what you're thinking? But my guess would be yes."

  "This is H?"

  "It's not called H anymore," Beth said. "It's called D now."

  "Do you mind if we just take a time-out for a moment?" I said. "Like if we put the movie on pause or something?"

  We tried for a few minutes to speak of other things, but with little success. I felt as though I'd been set up, although I realized this feeling was not particularly supported by the facts. We'd talked about it before, after all. I had made my curiosity known. Beth was, perhaps, only doing what I'd asked her to do. This was, apparently, something I wanted.

  "Okay," I said. "I'll admit to being curious. There's a grim sort of appeal. But there are practical considerations as well."

  "Such as?"

  "Such as the fact that people die from it."

  "You're scared?"

  "Goddamn right I'm scared," I said. "If there was a loaded gun sitting there on the table between us I'd be scared of that too."

  "It's not a loaded gun."

  "If that's the best thing you can say in its defense, I have to say your case is pretty weak."

  "It doesn't in any way resemble a loaded gun," Beth said. "It's not at all what you're thinking it is. After you do it, you won't even believe we had this conversation."

  "I already can't believe we've had this conversation," I said.

  BUT LATER I realized Beth was right. By then I was lying down on her futon, unable to remember the last time I'd moved. Beth was on the floor, slack-limbed, propped up against a wall. There was a complicated geometry of knots in my stomach: it was like I could feel every one of my internal organs, the whole intricate mechanism of sustaining my body. Yet the feeling was not an unpleasant one; no feeling was an unpleasant one. The pleasure was almost sexual, yet lacking sex's strain, its battle with self-consciousness, its animal need.

  "It's like sex without the sex," I said.

  The heroin had come in tiny doses of blocky gray powder. Beth had cut it with a steak knife on the surface of a CD case. The lines were small and dirty-looking, uneven and vaguely woebegone. They'd gone down with a slight burn, a chalky taste at the back of the throat, like a new manner of thirst.

  "What?" Beth said.

  At first I had felt nothing. Before the high came a spell of nausea, as brief as it was unsettling. When the dope hit it wasn't with the rush I'd expected, but rather a loosening, a final triumph of detachment.

  "Never mind," I said.

  It was a glorious physical glow, a slow burn. The room acquired a stillness. Movement had become unnecessary, extraneous. We were both still, our eyes closing as if in sleep, some deeper species of rest.

  "No," Beth said. "You're right. That's exactly what it's like."

  "It's not what I expected," I said. "Not at all. It's much, much easier."

  We'd turned off all the lights. The only illumination came from the street below, leaking through the curtains and into the room. Everything was shadowy, inert, the shadows slow dancing in the pattern the wind made with the tossing tree branches just outside the window.

  "It's the easiest thing in the world," Beth agreed.

  I sat up and instantly regretted doing so. Nausea rippled through my body in a swelling wave. "So you do this a lot," I said, swallowing hard, waiting for the tremors to subside.

  "I wouldn't say a lot," Beth said. "I'd say enough. Want some orange juice?"

  I nodded weakly, my eyes open now. Beth slowly leaned forward and slid the carton along the floor toward the couch. I looked down at it helplessly. After a long moment Beth noticed that I'd made no effort to pick it up.

  "You feeling sick?" she asked.

  "I'm great so long as I don't move," I said.

  After another minute or so Beth stood up and handed me the carton.

  I drank deeply and rashly, the juice tasting as good as anything ever had. A moment later I was in the bathroom, throwing up. I was pleasantly surprised that my vomiting had been sufficiently foreshadowed to allow me to make it to the toilet.

  It was the best puking experience of my life, the orange juice still cold coming back up. I walked back into the living room feeling terrifi
c, better than ever. Beth was now sprawled on the futon, blinking fast as I flicked on the overhead light. "Another round?" I said.

  THE SNOWSTORM had turned into a blizzard, and I had ended up spending the entire weekend with Beth in her cramped apartment. We hadn't even kissed on that first night, but then somehow the next morning, both of us coming up out of nodding off in Beth's bed, we'd ended making tentative, fragile love.

  I hadn't been expecting it—I thought heroin had already taken the place of sex between us. We'd gotten high again that night. By the time I left on Sunday evening, emerging onto wet city streets with slush and gray chunks of icy snow, I felt sick and exhausted and more than a little afraid.

  Back home, I went straight to bed, slept for nearly twelve straight hours, woke up Monday morning feeling almost back to normal. I wasn't looking forward to seeing Beth at the office, could not decide how to play it when I did. I knew the obvious: I should never see her again outside of work, should stop things now, should probably even try to get her transferred off of the case, avoid working with her.

  But I also knew that things between us weren't over, knew it through my resignation, as though I myself had no choice in the matter.

  When I'd seen her Monday morning the sight was a jolt. My body reacted to her mere presence: a thudding heart, awkward shyness, all the tired symptoms of a pounding high school crush. My resolution drained away at once: I was officially in trouble.

  Later in the week I confided in Paul. We'd been working late, were taking a dinner break in a conference room, each of us with nearly fifty dollars' worth of food, an easy indulgence since it was billed directly to our clients. It took me only a minute to convey the relevant facts, after which we'd sat in a long silence.

  "I'm trying to come up with something to say that you won't already know," Paul said at last.

  "I do already know."

  "But I can tell that knowing isn't really doing it for you."

  "I suppose that's right," I said.

  "If you just need confirmation of what a bad idea this is," Paul said, "I'm happy to give it to you. You're risking everything—your job, your health, your bar license, your fucking life."

  "Yes."

  "But you're not going to stop." Paul did not say it as a question.

  "Not just yet."

  Paul shook his head. To my surprise, he looked genuinely sad. It occurred to me that my confession had altered our friendship, perhaps permanently.

  And so it began. Soon I was spending every weekend with Beth. Our getting high always outnumbered our lovemaking. I did stick to my rule that I would do heroin only on the weekend. I was well aware that Beth had no such rule; her job performance continued to suffer. I found myself in the uncomfortable position of increasingly having to cover for her, right up to that day when her death had burst everything out into the open.

  Did I love her? Even to this day I wasn't sure. I knew, I always knew, that she didn't love me, and I liked to think I was pragmatic enough to restrain my own feelings when certain they would not be reciprocated. I suspected Beth was permanently incapable of love; what I knew for sure was that she was incapable of it in her current condition. What there was of our sex life quickly devolved from mediocre to lousy: Beth seemed fundamentally uninterested, her libido shut down by her addiction.

  The situation had become increasingly untenable, as I had known it would. I wondered how long I could maintain myself as a heroin dilettante, a weekend snorter, before things got out of control. I would have to do something.

  I was spared having to take action, but not in any way I ever would've wanted. The situation had taken on its own momentum, which led to its own resolution. Perhaps Beth's death had saved my life; who knows where I would've ended up if I'd continued down that path awhile longer?

  But I'd hardly gotten off scot-free: I'd lost my job, been suspended from practicing law for half a year, had to start all over again at the bottom. Of course, that was nothing compared to what Beth had lost.

  WHEN I was finished telling it I couldn't look at Myra. It was the first time I'd told the story to anyone. I hadn't looked at her while I was talking, my gaze fixed at some vague spot on the table. It'd been a long time since I'd been naked before another person—truly naked, not merely unclothed—and the feeling of total exposure felt terrifying. But it was necessary too: I needed to open myself to Myra. If anybody was going to be able to accept my wrecked little self it was her. I wanted to offer her that chance.

  "Do you miss heroin?" Myra asked after a long moment had passed.

  "What?" I replied, although it was clear to both of us that I'd heard her.

  "I would think you must still miss it," she said.

  "I don't, actually," I said. "Honestly. Heroin's like the best loveless sex you've ever had. But that's all it is."

  "Well, that can still be pretty amazing," Myra said.

  I looked at her, started to say something, didn't. "Anyway," I said, "as to the drug thing, I don't feel anything about it but shame and guilt."

  "Guilt?"

  "Sure," I said. "I hate that I was a part of the damage drugs do. I hate that I helped create the world that people like Lorenzo and Devin Wallace live in. I recognize my responsibility for it."

  "I think you're giving yourself too much credit," Myra said. "That's the world our client would be living in regardless of whether someone like you decided to experiment with dope."

  "Yes and no," I said. "I mean, one person more or less doesn't make any difference, sure, but if there wasn't any demand there wouldn't be any supply."

  "There'll always be demand," Myra said. "But let's not change the subject to the big picture. What about you?"

  "What about me?"

  "You sure you got it beat?"

  "Sure becomes a little relative when talking about such things," I said, thinking about the heroin from Shawne Flynt that was still waiting for me in my apartment.

  "Come on, Joel," Myra said. Her cell phone started ringing, audible from her purse, but she ignored it. "You don't even go to meetings? You're that sure of your own uniqueness? Of your own strength?"

  "I didn't claim there was anything unique about me," I said, finishing off the last of my Maker's Mark. "Just because everybody else announces their problems on Jerry Springer, that doesn't mean I can't choose to deal with my problems myself."

  "I think you're just another guy like me," Myra said.

  "And what're guys like you?"

  "People who just can't deal with the idea of having other people be in their lives."

  "Is that really how you think of yourself?"

  "I think that's why I like being a lawyer so much," Myra said. "It's a way of engaging with the world by way of other people's problems."

  "You let Terrell Gibbons into your life," I countered.

  "Sure," Myra said. "In a sense I did. But I mean, how safe is that? The guy's borderline retarded and accused of murder. I took on his problems as my own the best that I could, but at the end of the day they're still his problems, not mine. I had a couple of bad nights because I lost the appeal. But he's the one doing twenty-five to life in Sing Sing."

  "Well," I said, "there wouldn't be very many criminal defense lawyers if we had to serve our clients' sentences."

  "And I'm not saying I would trade places with Terrell even if I could. That's the point, though, isn't it? We get to go to war, but it's always someone else's battle. Win or lose for us, we live to fight another day. We're in the fight but not of the fight."

  "I know what you mean," I said. "But I don't agree that I'm somebody who can't let other people into my life."

  "Have you been with anyone since that girl died?" Myra asked softly. It wasn't a question I'd expected.

  "Not in a way that meant anything," I said. I looked up at Myra, but she kept her gaze down.

  "Do you want another drink?" I asked.

  "I don't think I can stay here any longer," Myra said. "The sound of other people having a good time is bu
gging the fuck out of me."

  The force of my disappointment surprised me. "Okay."

  "It's not that I want to be alone right now," Myra said quickly. "I don't, actually. We can still hang out."

  "Sure," I said. "I'm not going to be falling asleep anytime soon."

  "You want to come over?"

  "Yes," I said. "I do."

  Myra nodded, at last meeting my eyes. "Let's go, then," she said.

  WE WENT out onto Henry Street to hail a cab, walking down to the intersection. As we waited for the light to change, I stepped forward and kissed her. Myra leaned into me, her hand coming up to my shoulder, then my neck. After a few seconds she broke it off, resting her head against my chest as I held her. Her skin felt cold in the evening's chill. Only her mouth felt warm. "We know about one hundred people who work within six blocks of where we're standing right now," Myra said, a softness in her voice I hadn't heard before.

  "I think they all went home for the night some time ago," I replied.

  "When did you first know that you were going to kiss me?"

  "When did I first actually know? About thirty seconds ago. I've known that I wanted to for a while before that."

  "Let's find that cab," Myra said.

  MYRA AND I didn't speak on the short cab ride to her apartment on South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene. "There's beer in the fridge and vodka in the freezer," Myra said once we were inside. I could tell she was nervous, which only compounded my own nerves. Her apartment was muted and tasteful, considerably more adult than I'd been expecting: Myra had clearly nested here, built a home.

  "Which do you want?" I asked.

  "Would drinking vodka be too obvious an admission that I was getting myself drunk so that you could take advantage of me?" Myra asked.

  "Vodka it is," I said. "You got anything to mix with it?"

  "Does ice count?"

  I poured us a couple of drinks and brought them over to the couch. Myra had left the overheard light off, turning on a couple of lamps. She'd put on some music, something ambient and vague.

  "Your apartment's nice," I said.

  "What'd you think, there'd be pizza boxes on the floor?"

  "Something like that, yeah," I admitted.