The Price of the Ticket

by Jim Nisbet

  He placed bottle and glass in the outer orbit of the ring of light around the inverted saucer and there he had it: the perfect party diorama.

  The drug needed no additional pulverizing. Martin could see this, but he repulverized all of it anyway, just to be playing with it, his eye close upon it. Everybody likes to play with their drugs, but it’s even more fun to play with other people’s drugs. He pushed the cocaine around on the dark blue saucer with Pauley’s credit card for quite a considerable amount of time. He began with a heap of fine granules. This he divided into two. These he drew into long parallel ridges of powder, chopped transversely, re-piled into one. Then he switched to the razor blade, drew the pile into a line of granules, chopped them again, and so forth, fetishizing for quite a little time. Never in his remotest cough-medicined befuddlements had he malingered this long over bona fide sexual foreplay. A thought occurred to him: One can’t be too careful. But oh, hope! He moistened the tip of a finger, touched it gently to one of the piles, and rubbed the adhering grains to an area of gum above his upper left canine, which immediately became numb. The dog that his brain had become said Arf. So quickly did his gum become numb that he was startled. For though he had inhaled countless drafts of what purported to be cocaine under all kinds of circumstances, mostly in bathrooms at other people’s houses and dance clubs, Martin Seam had never experienced the extreme quality of the cocaine that circulates among brokers and barristers. He had in fact gotten commonly used to inhaling a great deal of baby laxative, often employed to bulk up cocaine for resale, which, as Seam could testify, has but one really tangible effect.

  He filled one sinus, savoring the scouring rasp as if he were inhaling the bouquet of a fine wine. Likewise his other sinus. Within two minutes his entire face was numb, an effect which passes for euphoria among cocaine users. There followed other, less tangible stimulations. The drug’s quality was indubitable.

  He took a small sip of brandy, then a larger one. It went down like water, taking a cocaine-flecked bolus of mucus with it. A few minutes later his esophagus was becoming numb from the top down. A few minutes after that the lining of his stomach checked out, too. Soon his bowels would move all by themselves.

  This was the real stuff! He snorted some more.

  He finished the flute of brandy and poured another. The bottle had three more glasses in it, maybe four.

  There was plenty of coke.

  He remembered the money. He could go out for more brandy. There were four beers left, too. Although, he reconsidered, the nearest store was six blocks away, on account of the neighborhood he lived in. No commercial enterprises flourished where the local land-owners might be disturbed by the sights or sounds of petty commerce. Though Seam felt invincible, he didn’t quite feel up to walking six blocks at night with money in his pocket and a heat on in a neighborhood with the highest incidence of rape in the city–not all the blocks could afford block security. He could get plenty paranoid right here at home, and plenty stoned, too. The brandy he would just husband, make it last until maybe the coke had run out. It wouldn’t take long: coke never does, no matter what the quality. While he was making this decision he discovered he had finished the second glass of brandy. Wow! This is good shit! He peered into the gloom beyond the far edge of the table as he poured out another finger of brandy. Wonder where this guy got this stuff? Who’d ever have thought that a guy wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off and a wallet with a chain on it would be holding such quality goods as this? Nothing else he was holding smacked of quality even remotely comparable. Including his Toyota truck! Ah ha. Ah ha ha ha. He pushed the Toyota ignition key and bits of automotive paperwork around on the table top next to the blue saucer with the idle edge of the credit card. He could read the card assignee’s name, Mark Paulos. Huh. A thought involving disposal of the body lifted its little wings in his mind, but Martin suppressed it. Guy thought he could just walk in here and ask for his money back. What a hippy! This is the city, babe. He tipped some more cocaine into his grinder, closed the top and milled for a moment, thinking about nothing in particular. Then he removed the top, spilled the mortar’s contents onto the blue saucer, and went back to pushing the fresh charge of cocaine around with the edge of the razor blade. First he made a little mountain. Then he made a little valley. Then he made two little mountains. Then he made two little windrows. Then he inhaled them. Somewhere in his mind, flirting with quite a few half-conceived skits such as what he was going to do with that pricey car stereo now and if the Toyota happened to be parked out front getting rid of this body might be easier than he’d originally thought, just wreck the truck somewhere with the body in it and drop the signed papers in a mailbox on the way home if this guy Paulos has any cocaine at all in his system as seemed almost certain, plus a bottle of beer, why, an autopsy would go no further. Obviously a heart attack. Ha ha ha. The verdict would be death by head injury incurred while driving under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, a one-vehicle crash, end of story. Just a few of weeks ago out shopping for a cylinder head at Hunters Point Seam had seen a wonderful place, a small peninsula that had an incredible view of the bay with a ramshackle Quonset hut on it almost entirely walled in by automotive junk. The road down to it was dirt and very steep, with either side falling straight into the bay. With a little luck the wreck wouldn’t be discovered at least until tomorrow and if the fog was thick a day or maybe two could pass, and conceivably the wreck of a truck would fit right in with the general decrepitude, unnoticed, for a week or two.

  His world had happily devolved to the little circle of light and the few objects within its scope. Martin thought of modulating the music to go along with his high, but he got impatient wondering just exactly which tracks to select and playing with the cocaine on the saucer he sort of forgot about the music, which turned itself off eventually. Those two new albums didn’t have much going for them anyway, if he’d bought that Peugeot bicycle he’d been looking at he could throw it in the back of the truck and ride it home after he’d run the truck with the body over the embankment. This site was at least five miles away. Cocaine in the bloodstream, not to mention Martin Seam’s bloodstream, Martian Seeming, he didn’t like when people called him that, what people, ha, ha, a little more of this stuff and I’ll take over the word he was thinking. World he meant. Marcie has a bicycle be a good excuse to call her, borrow the bicycle too much pressure at work they should think of making me a buyer temporarily give me a chance Paris, Milan, Tokyo, styles like that dump’s never had in the window much less in the brain, I know it’s late I want to pump off a little pressure ha ha, and he thought of those mirrors at Marcie’s and the one time in nearly a year they’d been drunk and stoned enough to give that mutual masturbation with strobe thing a try like playing doctor in a stereopticon only this is adult fantasy. She watched herself in the mirror more than she watched him, which was okay. It was actually a little hard for him to come with her watching him but with her watching herself so much and getting off he found he didn’t mind so much after all he was watching her but then it turned out she was right and it’s kind of an ego thing you watch yourself the whole time and it goes sort of okay, or something that passes for sort of okay, and then he was subsumed by the thought that out there in the dark world around him hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people were fucking. Right that moment. Actually fucking. Right now. Fucking fucking fucking.

  It was that kind of high for Martin. If he hadn’t anything else to worry about he would have sat there until the last of the cocaine wore off just before dawn and then started the heebee-jeebees wondering about who he knew in some time zone some place he might be able to call and if they answered the phone and said Hello Martin would be enough for him to know somebody somewhere loved him, and could verify that he exists, and realize that for him there was no such person. And that kind of high is okay you know sitting home all alone horning up a bunch of blow with no commitments and no surprises, no job to go to at 10:00 A.M., just a dead man on
the floor, whether it’s Saturday or not, hadn’t really sunk in yet, half and half of nothing he’d ever and something he’d never done before, and that neat split kept haunting around his cortex like static electricity on a piece of cat fur. Rub the flat of your hand along the fur with the light on and you can hear it but you can’t see it. Turn the light off and you hear and see it both. But unless you’re into inventing the electrostatic galvanometer as in who the fuck is you can’t do anything with it. You can’t catch it or charge a battery with it or run a Watchman or boil water with it, it’s just there, this weird side effect to someone’s having once skinned a cat, this idea is going nowhere, it’s probably best to drop the worry-wart stuff long enough to push some slightly larger lines around on the plate there, it’s the same old thing, the stuff wears off faster each time and it takes more and more in your face to get that glow going long and warm, which granted might have been warm but was never all that long in the first place, but seems to have tenacity in one’s memory as long and warm, let’s don’t forget, rats push the lever for long and warm rather than eat and live until they starve to death he cast a furtive glance over his shoulder toward Dirty Mickey on the wall but the room was too dark to see. Just as well and drop the worry-wart stuff. When you’ve got such a strong memory of what is happening it’s always reality that’s there to tell you different. Isn’t it? What did you just say you mean think? Man, Martin, you should have written that one down, it seemed profound at the moment anyway and it’s best to write and put those things away somewhere though not so far away as to forget where and have a look at them in the cold light of day. It’s one of those times when you’re thinking up the lyrics but you’re not writing the song, you should learn to make a note so you have it for those times when you’re writing the song but can’t think up the lyrics. Speaking of the cold light of day it’s going to be a mighty big surprise the cold light of day if he’s not trying to run that Toyota over an embankment well in advance of it. How long to decay? Darkness much better. Note that down. A fate writ in blow. If the Toyota’s out front, if nobody else is, if block security is on his periodic swing over in the next street or passed out drunk, if Marcie will loan me her bicycle good excuse to call her what if she isn’t home what time is it? At this hour the bitch wow, I’ll have to go over there in the Toyota and pick the bike up and–what? Come back for the guy? Take him with me in the first place and leave him in the truck while I go up to Marcie’s apartment? I command you to look like a sleeping drunk with a serious head wound. Sing sailor songs on the way out to the truck? Shanties? Know one? All those mirrors stoned and singing…?

  The brandy was gone and most of the coke and Seam was slobbering pretty badly by the time he didn’t know why he looked up. When he did he saw a small bluish-green light hovering about sixty inches off the floor in the middle of the kitchen door. If he’d looked closely enough he might have been able to make out that it was very narrow, maybe a quarter of an inch thick and an inch and a quarter long and tapered to a blunt point at each end. If he’d looked even closer he might have noticed that the little light was actually two little lights, that there was a small segment of darkness halfway between the two blunt points, where the bluish-green light ceased for maybe an eighth of an inch. Though it didn’t make much difference, because no matter where the one segment went the other segment followed, they moved in concert, so the two lights were and acted for all intents and purposes as a single light.

  He was in any case both fascinated and annoyed by it. The tiny light hovered glowing in the doorway much as his entire head hovered over the blue saucer in the circle cast by the 15-watt spot with one end of the pink-and-white-striped rootbeer straw in his nostril and the other end scissored at a bevel to the purpose tilted just so at the beginning of a huge linear mound of pinkish-bluish-whitish crystalline cocaine. He froze just like that. Well froze isn’t right. Martin Seam was so stoned he thought his brain was just handing him something pleasant to think about in return for such a steady state of continual stimulation. He was quite pseudo-warm, in fact. They say you get a sensation of profound warmth right before you freeze to death. He wasn’t frozen of course but he was so definitely perfectly numb he may as well have been. So his head just hovered there, like a helium balloon tethered to the plate by the straw, different kinds of little smiles and frowns flitting over his features like insects around a yard light after dark.

  Seam half-snorted the line of the moment as he watched the little colored light hovering in his kitchen doorway, first things first. He hadn’t heard anyone come in, and he’d never gotten around to making a decision about turning over the record, or redialing the CD or whatever had been playing he couldn’t remember, but he was so paranoid that he was sure that he’d have heard anyone come in through the outside door beyond the stove, record or no record, CD or no CD, and besides the door was locked–wasn’t it? The next logical possibility, if he’d been wearing glasses, would be to move his head and the gentle “windows of his soul” behind their little tinted lenses, change the angle of light in them, in the near certainty that the bluish-green light that appeared to be hovering within the frame of his living room door was in fact an odd fragment of light caught in one lens of his glasses, reflected from the little light above his head. He brought his hand up to adjust the temple bar and

  But hey, he wasn’t wearing glasses.

  He never had been wearing them, all night. And though he’d seen on top of the refrigerator the $150 pair of French aviator sunglasses he’d lifted from a specialty store by swapping them off the display rack with a $9 imitation pair carefully pre-selected in another store the day before, and even though they were yellow and made the whole world look post-nuclear while making him feel clairvoyant, he wore no such shades tonight. But he’d seen them tonight. Aha. So okay, that’s what put that thought into his head. He’d seen them tonight.

  And then he heard a quick movement of air, nearly a gasp or a sigh but it might have been the fog wind moving the drapes if the door were open, and the light plunged like a distant falling star, like some god had flicked away a radioactive cigarette.

  He heard this sound in spite of the fact that he was inhaling loudly through the rootbeer straw at the time, and in spite of the fact that he’d done so much cocaine so fast that his ears were humming like an around-the-world telephone connection. He hesitated midline, and rolled his black pupils up over the whites of his eyes, toward the door.

  About eighteen inches above the floor the light reappeared. It had turned completely blue. Rising slowly it began to orange itself. Three quarters of the way back to its original height it went pink. By the time the light had regained its original height it was red. Martian red. And now it was accompanied by a strange sound, a keening, like, like a cat growling. Quite a few feral cats lived in the bushes in.…

  …in Golden Gate Park.

  Weird, thought Martin, dropping his eyes so as to finish up the long line, this isn’t Golden Gate Park. And now for the other nostril, if it still works.

  The light over the table abruptly extinguished. Martin Seam hadn’t heard the tell-tale sizzle and spit, those cheap spots go fast, but at any rate darkness was now complete, and such was the nature of this little remaining sliver of red light that it was impossible to tell how far away it was and in fact he glanced over his shoulder wrong shoulder but there it was red in the mirror so it must be real but over his other shoulder and back front again and in fact its color was indistinguishable from various little red lights in the bank of stereo gear. Maybe it had strayed from there? No, that’s untenably weird. Maybe it had strayed from the mirror, then. No, no, that’s too untenably weird. It seemed to move as he moved. Rising to investigate, to protest, to cross the tiny room to test the switch for the overhead light, Martin Seam stepped around the metal table and encountered innumerable invisible filaments draping his face, as if he had walked into a tangle of spider webs. He heard and felt nothing else. He waved his arms before his face as if to disentang
le himself from the gossamer, and heard a little schnick. A slight pressure on his right hand caused him to convulse its fingers, and he felt, if he did not immediately realize, that, along with other remotely ominous if not threatening percepts, the length of the short straw he’d just been holding to his face had been reduced by half. Furthermore, it had become too slippery to hold on to. Currents of threaded air moved about his face, and with his left hand he made as if to clear his way by fanning it. Minute sensations trickled along his hand and fingertips, like whispers in a confessional. Now he realized that his shirt was wet–with sweat? Mousse? Brandy? His progress toward the light switch was delayed. The little flittings and whispers continued about his head and shoulders and arms and trunk, as swiftly and with as little noise as so many bats and their insect prey erratically circumnavigating a belfry at sunset, but as raptly attentive, as lovingly, as claustrophobic, and with as slight a rustle, as of a window dresser wistfully draping wedding tulle over a mannequin in a storefront.