by Jw Schnarr
Alice pulled the foil from her cigarette pack and ran her lighter under it. When the paper lifted she peeled it off, tossed it aside, and flashed the foil with the lighter again to burn the rest of the glue.
Dorothy sat down beside her.
“You fold the foil in half so it makes a little valley,” Alice said. “Then you cook it from the bottom. The junk turns into a liquid when it’s heated, and then it’ll burn off.”
“That’s how you smoke it?” Dorothy said.
“It’s one way of smoking it,” Alice said. “It’s called chasing the dragon. You roll up a piece of paper or a dollar bill and catch the smoke as it burns off.”
“Sounds simple,” Dorothy said. She unfolded her hands and sat on them, and inched closer to Alice. She leaned down and smelled Alice’s bare shoulder. She smelled faintly of wild flowers and baby powder.
“Oh, it is! Nothing to it. You can watch me, if you want. Then if you want to try it I’ll set it up for you. Then we can lay in the dark and listen to some music or something.”
“That sounds really nice,” Dorothy said. Am I really going through with this? Looking at Alice, she realized her mind was already made up for her. Yes, she was. Because it’s what Alice wanted.
“Ah-ha!” Alice said. She reached over and pulled the straw out of her drink, then clamped it in her teeth and smiled up at Dorothy. She broke a piece of the heroin off with her fingernail, looked at it for a moment, and then did it again. Then she flicked the lighter under the foil and the brown clumps turned to an amber liquid. After a moment of bubbling, a white smoke rose off the foil and the smell of vinegar and talcum powder wafted toward Dorothy. Alice sucked deeply on the straw and coughed into her hand, then looked over at Dorothy, eyes watering, and smiled. She reached out with one hand and pulled Dorothy’s head until their noses were touching.
Alice kissed Dorothy’s bottom lip. When Dorothy opened her mouth in response, Alice blew smoke into her. The taste of vinegar and Alice’s spit flooded Dorothy’s senses. She held her breath as long as she could, then blew out the last of Alice’s toke into the air. The world began to slow down.
“See?” Alice said, kissing Dorothy again. “Not so bad.”
“Umm,” Dorothy said, and then giggled. “No.”
“Let me set up another one for you,” Alice said. She scraped a bit more off the brick and set it in the centre of the foil. Then she handed the straw to Dorothy.
“So I just suck on it?”
“Yeah. Slowly though, so you can get it all.”
“Sounds kinda dirty.”
“It’s not dirty. It’s beautiful. Just wait. And try not to cough.” Alice flicked the lighter and heated the dope. When it began to smoke, she nodded. “Okay, now.”
Dorothy drew in her breath slowly, like Alice told her, and her head filled with vinegar. The smoke was extremely rough, even though Dorothy was a smoker, she found herself fighting off the urge to gag on the bitter taste.
“Keep it in!” Alice cried happily.
Finally Dorothy pulled her head back and drew a deep breath to cool her smouldering throat. She lay back on the bed awash in the unfamiliar disconnect of an opiate high, as though her soul had come undone from her body and was now flapping around her like a loose tooth. Alice finished her hit for her and then leaned over Dorothy.
“So?”
“I think I’m in love,” Dorothy said, looking up into Alice’s ice water eyes.
Alice laughed, misunderstanding. “I felt the same way after my first hit,” she said. “Let’s do some more. That fuckin’ shit they were giving me in the hospital is making it hard for me to get high.”
“In a minute,” Dorothy said slowly. There was piano music in her head, melancholy and beautiful and spreading out from her heart and filling her veins with sunshine. It was like smoking pure joy.
Alice set up another hit and smoked it herself, coughing lightly and blowing a plume of smoke out over Dorothy.
Dorothy imagined she could see the particles of smoke like tiny bits of blue-gray caterpillars. “Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering. “I think someone might have called for you.”
Alice laughed. “What?”
“When I was looking for the Tylenol, the guy in the booth got a call and I thought maybe it was for you, but he asked for someone else. Then he called you that other name, so it was confusing.” She folded her hands behind her head. She wished she was outside so she could look at the stars, but the bed was comfortable and she didn’t want to get up.
“Here,” Alice said, handing the foil back to her. “You’re not making any sense.”
“Probably nothing,” Dorothy said. She sat up and took the rig. This time when she breathed the smoke in, her throat was mostly numb and she didn’t cough. Instead she leaned over and kissed the smoke into Alice’s mouth. Then she handed everything back and lay down again.
“It’s so peaceful,” she said.
The lighter flicked and Alice smoked and smoked.
“How’s your head?”
“Much better,” Alice said. “I can’t hear him at all anymore. It’s like he went to sleep or something. Poof. Back down the hole.”
“Him?” Dorothy rolled onto her side and looked up at Alice. She’d never gotten high with someone she loved before. She felt so connected. So warm.
“Yeah,” Alice said. Then she shook her head. “Not important. I think I pulled something out of my dream and it won’t go back.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dorothy said. “Dreams aren’t real.”
“What if you dream about real things?” Alice said. She rubbed her teeth with her fingers then lay down beside Dorothy. The girls’ arms found each other, and they lay in a tangled heap staring up at the ceiling.
“I dunno, I guess so,” Dorothy said. After a while, she said: “Do you think we’re going to be alright?”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “Once we sell some of this brick we’ll have enough cash to go wherever we want.”
“I want to go to Oz,” Dorothy said.
“Point me in the right direction,” Alice said.
“It’s out in the desert somewhere,” she said. “It’s surrounded by sand.”
“Arizona?”
“Maybe. You can only get there when something really bad happens. It’s like, a door or something. An earthquake, tornado. something like that.”
“I dunno,” Alice said. “That sounds pretty fucked up.”
“It is,” Dorothy said. “I guess I don’t really believe it. I just want it to be true so bad. After my parents died it was the only thing I had to hold on to. These stupid baby stories my dad used to tell me.”
Alice propped herself up on one elbow so she could look down into Dorothy’s face.
“Were you trying to kill yourself when you drove at that tornado?”
Dorothy looked down at her hands and then looked away. When she looked back, her eyes were bright with tears.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You shouldn’t have been up in that ward at all,” Alice said.
“No. When I got in there they asked me all this shit about what I was feeling. I started making up stuff. I don’t know why. Maybe the attention was nice, for once.”
“I get it,” Alice said. “It’s hard to be a ghost sometimes.”
“They gave this paperwork to fill out, and it was really easy to see what they were looking for. It had a sliding chart you know, like agree, disagree, strongly agree, and stuff like that. All the questions that asked about fantasy lands I checked strongly agree. Then I added in stuff about the world trying to get me and how I needed to get away. They signed me in the next day. Had a room full of brain doctors in there. Dr Weller was the first one.”
“He’s a fuckin’ prick,” Alice said. “I hate that guy.”
“He’s not so bad. He listened a lot to what I was saying. He said I was a flight risk but I was also a voluntary patient so they couldn’t keep me. That’s why I was allowed to go down
stairs for ice creams and sneak out for smokes sometimes.”
“Boy was he wrong,” Alice said. She smiled, then leaned down and kissed Dorothy’s nose.
“He didn’t know what a bad influence you’d be on me,” Dorothy said, wrinkling her nose and smiling. “Probably thought he could save my soul or something.”
“Probably thought he could get down your pants,” Alice said.
“Yeah well, that too.”
Dorothy lay still, smelling Alice’s hair and enjoying the places where their bodies were touching. The heroin made her feel drifty. Alice was right. It did feel like a warm bath inside her. Her heart was pumping sunlight as thick as amber maple syrup through her veins. She felt every beat. “I guess I just always feel out of place,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I wish I could just sit and watch the world go by without me in it sometimes.”
“I hear it,” Alice said.
“Yeah. I guess you do.”
“That’s why God invented heroin. So you could have a little time out now and again.”
“He knew what he was doing,” Dorothy said.
“He always does.”
Outside the world skipped by, and the girls laid together in the warm dark and watched it go. After a while, they melded into a single, beautiful form.
Chapter 23
Hours later the rain had stopped, and Alice lie in the dark staring up at the ceiling with Dorothy sleeping beside her. Her face was twisted in a cruel smile and she mouthed the words Your hair wants to be cut over and over again. Dorothy mumbled something in her sleep and pulled Toto close. Alice nuzzled the side of the girl’s face with her nose. She pulled back her lips in a hideous grin and snapped her teeth like she was about to bite Dorothy’s nose off. At the last moment she turned away. Teasing.
“Your hair wants to be cut,” she whispered, careful not to wake the girl. She wondered how people could sleep with another person in the bed. How vulnerable they were, and how little people really knew of each other. And people were capable of anything. They were horrible to one another. The Queen of Hearts was an absolute butcher and yet, she still went to bed at night. Still slept with other people in the room.
Alice carefully unraveled herself from Dorothy and got dressed. Moments later she was standing outside the hotel room, Rabbit’s freezer-gun in hand, breathing in the wet night air. She crossed the parking lot to the front office and tucked the gun into the back of her pants. Dorothy had something queer when they were smoking up, and now Alice and the Hater were going to go check up on it. Somebody called for you Dorothy had said. That simply wouldn’t do.
She could see Steve through one of the side windows, smoking a cigarette and watching television. Thanks to the yellow light of the flourescent bulbs that lit the office, however, Steve couldn’t see outside at all. The windows would look like blue-black sheets of plastic covering the glass from where he sat.
“Tweedle - dee - dee,” Alice said. “All alone, in need of some company.” She cocked her head as she watched him. The glass booth he was sitting in looked like a fishbowl, complete with lazy air bubbles and gulping, bug-eyed goldfish. Their heads were swollen with blood. Their eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and they looked like they might just fall out of their socket at any moment. They swam and gulped the water, and when their gills flashed they vented fans of bloody pus.
Steve seemed not to notice how sick the fish were. He was suddenly Steve the Diver, with an air hose rammed up his ass so he could swim up to the top of the bowl. Then he’d flop back down into his chair in front of the television. He had a pink Fleshlight in one hand and a spear in the other, only it wasn’t really a spear at all. It was more like a leg bone that had been ground down to a point on the business end by rubbing it on the sidewalk. The Fleshlight wasn’t pink latex; it had a real pussy on the end of it. Occasionally the pussy smiled, or lapped at its lips with a long slick tongue. It smiled and flashed more pottery teeth like the girl from the bathroom mirror. The sight of the lapping cunt filled Alice with a bile of rage.
I want to fuck your mouth, Steve the Diver said. Then you can blow your wad in my ass. When he spoke, the words came out as pink and blue soap bubbles. As each one popped the sound traveled to Alice’s ears. One of the goldfish was shitting intestines out into the bowl, and as the free end of the fleshy tube drifted by Steve he suddenly reached out and clamped onto it with his teeth. The Fleshlight vanished from his hand and he began to suck the intestine like a cock, jerking it at the same time like a macabre porn star.
When the rotting goldfish above him started to cum, it bucked and shuddered. The way it was gulping made Alice think about biting Dorothy’s face while she slept, but then Steve was sucking the pus and blood out of the fish and taking it all, really sucking dick like a champ, gulping fish fluids down and letting some of it spill onto his face so it would be more sexy.
The goldfish buckled like a stomped tin can, and Steve the Diver was showered in little gold scales. They came to rest with the sound of hammer strikes and gunshots, but Steve didn’t seem to notice. He was watching television again, his diving costume gone, sipping hot tea and belching loudly.
Tweedle - dee - dee, he belched. Tweedle Dum. Make me cum.
Alice walked to the front of the building and opened the door. The television was screeching static and jumbled nonsense she couldn’t understand; the pounding of steel on steel from the fish scales settled into a semi regular drumbeat. It took a moment for Alice to pick out a vocal line in all the shrieking, grating noise; your hair wants to be cut, your hair wants to be cut. It wanted to be cut, oh yes, and she was just the one to do the cutting. She didn’t have a knife, but she was sure Rabbit’s gun would do the trick. A girl could accomplish anything if she just put her mind to it, wasn’t that right? Anything at all. Of course, if her mind was someone else’s, well, all bets were off. May as well give her the gold medal ribbon and tell the other contestants to go home, because Alice had handed something over to a man truly capable of anything, and was about to show her just how capable.
Like cutting hair with a gun. Or sticking it in his ass to make him cum. The screeching television had been reduced to a steady hyugh, hyugh, hyugh, like the sound of a washer with a blanket in the spin cycle.
Alice walked up to the desk and planted a pink lipstick kiss on the glass. She caught sight of her reflection as she did. It was warbled and defiled, but there was no doubt that it wasn’t Alice. Alice was back in the room, sleeping off her dope high. Or she was tucked away safely in the back of her mind. The Hater was driving now. And he had some very specific ideas about how little girls were supposed to behave.
Steve looked up and smiled when he saw Alice.
Alice smiled back.
Chapter 24
The next morning Dorothy woke before Alice and untangled herself from their ball of warmth in the middle of the bed. Her mouth was raw and fuzzy. She swished with some tap water in the bathroom then decided a shower might be in order. Her brain was coated with cobwebs and garden lattice from the drugs. Steaming hot water and packets of shampoo seemed like the perfect cure.
She turned the water on and the pipes groaned. She undressed and stepped into the tub. The fugue of the night before washed away from her skin under hot, soapy water, and soon was swirling around the rusting drain, gone forever. She tried to remember when exactly they had fallen asleep and found she couldn’t. There were little Polaroid images of them laying in the dark and talking, and snippets of conversation between episodes of smoking and resting. The heroin made her feel asleep and awake at the same time. Maybe she had dreamt the evening. Maybe she’d been awake all night.
One of the Polaroid flashes was of Dorothy admitting to faking her hospital tests. Guilt bloomed in her stomach. She would have never told Alice if they’d both been sober. The drugs had stripped her inhibitions away, however, and it had seemed a natural topic to discuss. She loved Alice. Love meant no secrets. She wanted to take that back now though
, standing in the light of sobriety. She wondered if Alice might hate her for it, or think she was pathetic.
If Alice woke up and hated her, Dorothy would have no one to blame but herself. And what would she do? Alice would get dressed, tell her to fuck off, and probably head out on the road alone. She could picture the girl, face pink and flushed, blue eyes blazing and flaxen yellow hair dancing around her as she left a sobbing and begging Dorothy alone in the motel room. Dorothy’s makeup and nose would be running, and her simpering, blubbering noises of pity would make Alice hate her even more. Then she would get in Rabbit’s car, flip Dorothy off, and be gone forever while Dorothy stood alone in the rain.