Can’t do it anymore, Ciara, she remembers her father saying, sadly. Don’t have the money, nor the time. You’re a grown woman, girl. From now on, this goes on you.
Sad, obviously, but she understood, then and now. They have four other children, all reasonably fit, capable of moving forward without tearing apart whatever’s around them, or damaging themselves on the world’s sharp edges. And it’s no one’s fault, nothing she resents, a simple accident of genetics; mere chemistry, ruining her from the inside first, then building her back up again, from the out. Round and round and round without stop, without fail, without end. Like some bad fairy’s curse.
God knows she’d leave herself behind, and gladly, if she only could.
With the drugs, most times, it’s one day off to two days on, dodging side effects for as long as she can before she’s forced to switch up her dosages just to maintain, or even change brands entirely. What creeps up on her is a symptomatological spectrum, an easily-recognizable cocktail of bodily annoyances: constipation vs. diarrhea, water retention vs. skin photosensitivity, exhaustion vs. insomnia. And hallucinations, of course—eventually and always, whether auditory, visual, or a winning combination of the two. Hallucinations, as Keanu Reeves would say, like whoa.
Sometimes she sees people she damn well knows aren’t there, and on bad days, they speak to her. On very bad days, it’s things which speak to her—objects, images, pareidolia—and on days like those, she tends to stay inside. Because those are the days when she’s never entirely sure anything she sees is actually there or not, even if it doesn’t talk at all.
Luckily, today’s just a middling day, making her fit to ride her bike over to Garth’s. Which she does, after carefully making sure to shower, and dress.
After buzzing her through downstairs, Garth greets her at his apartment’s door, all but pulling her inside before she quite has time to lean her bike against the wall. “Bitch, you tardy,” is the first thing he busts out with, in his weird Mississauga gangsta way, as though she’s missed some sort of already-established formal appointment. “How come you ain’t pick up already, like maybe the first ten times I rung? You turn your phone off, or what?”
“My phone’s always on, Garth.”
“Yeah, well: matter of debate, not that this the time. You ready to work?”
“That’s why I came by.”
“So you do read texts, then, if nothin’ else.”
“Well, yes. Why would you bother sending me any, if you thought I didn’t?”
Garth gives her a look like he’s fixing to check her for track-marks, then just laughs, instead. Says: “Ciara, shorty, you a damn trip. Anyhow, whatever—up for a delivery run? Last-minute order, so the pay’s good.”
“Where to?”
“Down Harbourfront, past the docks. Cherry Beach, almost.”
Ciara nods. “It’ll take a while, if I keep under the speed limit.”
“That’s what you bring to the party, baby. Go slow as you want, long’s you don’t get stopped on the way, you feel me? Oh, and don’t take no shit, when you get there; them fools been up a week straight, at least. Chances are, by the time you knock their door, they gonna forget they ever called me.”
“Why? What are they doing?”
Garth snorts. “Shit, bitch, who care ‘bout that? I don’t ask, so they ain’t tell me.” He flips open the fridge, rummaging through the stash hidden behind six months’ worth of carefully cultivated freezer ice for first one baggie, then two. “Okay, so here goes: red for up, blue for down; that’s what you tell ‘em. Three bills each, six for both. That’s four for me, two for you, all right?”
Ciara tucks the bags away. “All right,” she agrees, without much interest; her cut has been other things at other times, depending on how much Garth can score from one or another of the many private clinics where he’s worked over the years, playing various contacts desperate for under-the-counter money against each other in a constant struggle to turn mislaid surplus into ill-gotten profit. So she doesn’t care much to argue percentages overall, not so long as she’s kept in the loop, and reasonably solvent after expenses. “You want me to bring it back tonight?”
“Naw, I trust you. Come by tomorrow to pick up, ‘round six.”
“I might be asleep.”
“Not after I show up, you won’t. Now get gone.”
Garth’s place is mercifully free of hallucinations, for once, but as the door closes behind her Ciara gets the distinct impression that might be about to change; the apartment building’s hall looks different, somehow, light diffuse and variable, as though the fixtures are suddenly full of bugs: semi-transparent bodies cluster-crawling across the bulbs inside, cooking themselves against the hot, fragile glass skin. She can almost smell them starting to smoke, and it makes her move faster, ever faster—stabbing for the elevator’s button, counting off the seconds it takes to make the lobby, taking the steps outside in a single jump as the bike judders and bounces its own way down alongside her.
Above, the sky’s now completely dark, no stars showing in the streetlamps’ flat white glare. Ciara can still remember when at least half of them weren’t halogen, that leaky yellow sodium light bleaching everyone who passed underneath to almost the self-same shade, like extras from a Hopper painting; comforting, in its own weird way. More . . . natural.
These new lights, though—they don’t seem to follow the same spectrum. Everything’s reduced to two categories: illuminated, or not. Whatever’s outside each bright pool shrinks away, becoming insignificant; whatever’s inside looks artificial, impermanent. Like nothing matters, all too much.
Sports events, sex shows, executions—this sort of light matches all of them, any of them. It’s good for details. Normalizes the abnormal. And it doesn’t disturb her, not really, because if there’re things you’d do at night that you’d never do during the day, then what does that mean if all her days are nights, now? What does any of it mean?
Nothing. It’s just the way things are.
She mounts up, wobbling slightly, and turns her bike into traffic.
The house stands on its own in the middle of nowhere, bordering a classic industrial zone—warehouses, scrub-lots, an abandoned factory the city just hasn’t gotten around to knocking down yet, let alone turning into condos. There’s a nightclub banging away in the distance, but otherwise it’s denuded and almost silent, lit up by spill from the lights down at the docks, where shipping containers get loaded and unloaded. These are places where the map runs out, where the city becomes unpredictable—the places you have to Google in order to get there, and almost always end up getting lost along the way, anyhow.
Her social worker says Ciara really shouldn’t bike, not on the meds she’s giving her. “It’s not riding, it’s driving,” she likes to tell Ciara, as though that makes a bit of difference, aside from etymologically. “I’d lobby for all bicycle owners to be licensed, if I could.”
“So why don’t you?” Ciara asked once, or maybe just thinks she did; not out of interest, so much, as simple need to say something in response, when the woman insists on nattering on like that. It’s only polite to keep up your end of the conversation, or so her family eventually managed to teach her through painstaking repetition, trial and error, home training: stop speaking long enough to listen to what the other person is saying, nod and smile, act like you care even when you don’t. File the basics away, so as to make sure you’re able to answer questions.
But her worker simply shook her head and let it slide, and weeks later, Ciara doesn’t recall the subject ever having reoccurred. Another functionally meaningless interaction, same as every other—she wouldn’t go at all, if she could get away with it. Why should Ciara be legally forced to shoulder the burden of someone else’s diffident attention every week, their useless pseudo-sympathy, simply to maintain her access to scrip? Especially since she could easily swap Garth for the exact same psychoactives, almost, then wander away high but “readjusted,” with what small part of
her dignity remains intact . . .
A lifetime on parole, she thinks, when I never did anything to anyone but myself—nothing permanent, any rate. There’s no justice in it.
Yes, and no justice anywhere else, either, for that matter. But this is old news.
It’s a witch’s lair, Ciara thinks, still looking at it. Two-story, detached but flat on one side, as though it used to be one half of a duplex, the other section long-demolished. It has a front-gabled roof, shingles peeling, gutters rusty and sprung; the narrow windows leer and squint, dirt-cataracted. The porch roof sags, but not dangerously so—and is that something peeping down at her now, curling round from behind the chimney, a sinuous shadow, black-furred yet boneless as a snake?
No, obviously. By no means. Not at all.
She parks the bike against the steps, mounts them, knocks and waits. Knocks again. Avoids looking too long at the knocker itself, for fear it’ll develop a face. Even considered from an angle, however, it still looks suspiciously profile-esque: crosspiece bolted on either side, creating a flat, bulge-eyed hammerhead shark visor; the knocker itself hangs down labially, weight front and centre, a vertical piercing.
And: thinking too much about thinking, reaching for words, obsessing over description; shit, shit, that’s never good. Stay quiet, she finds she can’t quite keep from begging, uselessly, if only inside her head, own lips decisively firm-sealed. Don’t talk, don’t talk, please. Don’t.
Like that ever works.
From the back of the house comes a vague commotion, meanwhile, barking and clattering plus a woman’s voice yelling about keeping her hair on, along with what sounds like a baby—babies?—screaming from someplace downstairs, not up. Who keeps babies in a basement? Ciara wonders, as she stands there with arms folded ‘til at least two sets of interior locks shoot back, door scraping open a bare, chained, hand’s breadth to reveal a squinched-up slice of face, gaze dubious, red-threaded, possibly from lack of sleep, or a contact high.
“Garth sent me,” she tells the woman, remembering to make eye contact, brief but firm. “You made an order—I’m delivery.”
“Yeah, sure.” A pause. “So . . . when was that?”
“No idea. I work outsource; he tells me where to go, with what, and I do. What kicks it off is your business.”
“That’s no way to live, girlie.” Then, like it just occurred to her: “How I know you’re not 4-0?”
“Seriously?” Ciara sighs, tugs her shirt up, flashing a double B-cup’s worth of unwired bra, then turns her bag out on the steps. The second the pills hit, the door’s already open, client scrabbling them inside with both hands, snarling: “Jesus, what are you, retarded? Get your ass inside, ‘fore somebody sees . . .”
“Nobody lives ‘round here to ‘see’ anything. That’s why you’re here, probably.”
“Just come the fuck in, is what I said! Christ.”
Inside, the house is crowded and dusty, the barking/crying louder, definitely located beneath their feet. Garth’s client rolls her eyes, shaking her head hard, as though she’s trying to fend the sound off bodily. “Christ!” she repeats, raking her hand through tangled hair. Then adds: “Never have kids.”
Ciara nods, as if it’s ever actually been an option. “I hear they’re worth it, though,” she replies, recalling previous interactions with mothers (not her own).
“For somebody, sure.”
Ciara raises her eyebrows, slightly.
The woman hastens to explain. “Oh, those aren’t mine. I’m just . . . lookin’ after ‘em, ‘til somebody comes to pick ‘em up.”
“Parents?”
“New parents.”
I don’t follow, Ciara wants to say. But: “Hmmm,” she replies, instead—always her go-to fall-back when she doesn’t understand something she’s just heard, and the woman sighs.
“Look—you know how rich people’ll go all the way to Russia or Romania, Ukraine sometimes, just so they can get hold of a cute, white baby? Well, sometimes they don’t turn out so cute, later on. Still blonde and blue eyes, and whatever, but—there’s bad stuff going on in those places, so the kids aren’t . . . wired right. Can’t socialize ‘em, no matter how much expensive baby shit you buy. Except it’s all on the inside, so’s you don’t necessarily notice ‘til you’ve had ‘em around a while, and they still won’t talk, or hug you, or . . . anything . . . ”
Ciara nods. This, for a change, makes sense to her; she’s always understood transactions. “They feel like they got cheated. Want to give the kids back.”
The client snorts. “Yeah, well, good luck on that one. No, it’s easier to swap ‘em out to somebody else in North America who got screwed the same way, trade one with more of the good stuff for one with less, so everybody’s happy.” Adding, as though it’s something she keeps trying to convince herself of: “They’re not bad people, you know, any of ‘em. Just want what they want, is all.”
“Capitalism.”
“Exactly.”
If she were somebody else, Ciara thinks, she might be surprised the woman would tell her about all this, let alone in such detail. But people tend to talk to her as a rule, both spontaneously and volubly, about all sorts of oddness—even white people, even authority figures. Helps that most folk she meets these days are on drugs, but it actually extends much further, in every direction; people both above and below her pay-grade end up treating her like a human sounding-board, a pet or a priest, something barely animate which listens and doesn’t judge, something which can’t easily distinguish between what it’s hearing and what it might have heard.
Those who make the effort to get to know her soon start to understand she’s her own unreliable narrator and act accordingly, but even the ones who don’t seem to get the same impression, nonetheless receive it subliminally, like a signal, or a smell. Some pheromonal signature she doesn’t even know she’s emitting, because she’s personally immune to it.
As the woman counts out cash from a stash in her freezer, Ciara just stands there, wondering what to feel about all this. Nothing would be most practical, as usual. But her eyes keep on being drawn here and there, scanning for signs of abuse beyond the general atmosphere of filth and decay, the rampant recreational drug use. Wasn’t there supposed to be another person living here? she wonders, finally replaying what Garth said: these fools, right. Not that it really makes much difference, either way.
“What’s wrong with you, anyhow?” the woman asks her, still counting.
Ciara shakes her head sharply, to clear it, and replies: “Diagnoses vary.”
The woman barks a laugh. “Don’t they always! Still, you talk pretty good, for a crazy person.”
“I was in university when I finally got a full psych eval, and they put me on the register. Right after I had my first—public—episodes.”
“Didn’t graduate, huh?”
Ciara nods.
“What happened?”
Again, Ciara has to think, dragging the memories up from under deep water; talks the timeline through carefully, trying not to paraphrase. “The initial break, I stayed up two weeks, ‘til I blacked out. Thought I was writing my thesis with my mind. The second . . . that time I was at a bar, doing shots with friends, because somebody’s team had won. I think I started to sing. And then I woke up, and it was two days later, in jail, with an officer telling me I bit this guy’s earlobe off. My parents bailed me out, got me looked at, assessed; next thing I knew, I’d been committed.”
“Sounds rough.”
Ciara nods again, slightly. “Thank you,” she says, the only thing she can think to say, to which the woman just nods, giving her the roll. “Red for up, blue for down,” Ciara reminds her, trying to be helpful, as she hands her the pills in exchange; the client laughs again, tossing her greasy head like a bad parody of a supermodel.
“Think I don’t know that, by now?” she demands, and Ciara barely restrains herself from answering: well, I’d hope you did. Given how much of this stuff you probably take.
/> Moments later she’s back outside, door shut and locked behind. Bone moon up above, like a bad silver penny; the clouds scud shut across it, making it wink. Cricket-noise rises from everywhere around, so pointed it sounds almost fake, as though meant to hide the fact that she’s being surveilled. As though the world itself is keeping watch on her, never resting, never letting her rest.
Time to go home, girl, Ciara thinks, re-mounting her bike. Yet she thinks she can still hear the babies wailing, nevertheless—muffled by rock and concrete and glass, seeping up from underground—even while she rides away.
Blink and it’s three in the morning, then five, then six: blue blush at the horizon, cruel light seeping in like a bruise, finally lulling her to sleep. Then it’s noon or later, the phone screaming at her in—U2’s “Discotheque,” which her brain easily translates into Garth’s voice: bitch, pick up; where you at, bitch? Ciara! Put me on damn speaker, already.
She grabs it up, fumbles her thumbprint into the lock, stabs the appropriate button. “Yes, it’s me, I’m here. What is it?”
“Two in the damn PM, that’s what it is. Where’s my money, honey?”
“Uh . . . in my bag, I guess. Where I left it.”
“Cool, ‘swhat I thought. Now buzz me in.”
Because he’s down there already, ringing her while looking up at her apartment; yes, of course. This makes sense. Ciara shakes her head, first side to side, then up and down, an invisible cross—should clear it, almost always does, but this time . . . static lingers. There’s a hum still left underneath everything, louder than ever. A faint scritch, scales on scales, like serpents coiling.
Garth is solid, though, as ever. He makes a good tide-brake.
“Man, this place ain’t much of much, is it?” he observes, looking around, as Ciara counts out her cut before turning the rest of the roll over. “Too much stuff in too little space. Look like you filmin’ an episode of Hoarders.”
Strangers Among Us Page 29