Eve

by Gina Troisi

Celia fumbles with the front door’s gold handle. Without cocaine, her legs feel weighted down, as if shackled to one another, slumping in quicksand. Her hands quiver the way an aging alcoholic’s does before the first drink of the day. Her knuckles are red and cracking with winter’s rawness. She jams the key into the lock and pushes her shoulder against the door, bursting into the house. 

Her mother stands over the island countertop, kneading a hunk of dough with her knuckles. “Hi, honey.” She glances up at Celia and smiles. Her mother keeps herself put together, with tinted makeup and neatly pressed clothes, but her age is showing. Webbed lines etch the outside of her eyes. She looks tired.

Celia fills a glass with tap water. Her hands shake. “Do you really have to lock the door even when you’re home?” She takes a sip and her front teeth clang against the glass. “It’s freezing out,” she says. “What are you making?”    

“You have a key.” Her mother pauses, takes a deep breath, and begins to roll the dough, flattening it. “I’m making a nice calzone for the freezer.”

Her mother dabs egg onto the dough, moistening its cracks. Cooking is the activity she finds most relaxing. She works, comes home, and stocks the freezer.  

Celia’s mother annoys her—she knows it is her own fault, nineteen years old and still living at home when she should be off on her own somewhere in a quaint studio apartment. Or, at college. Still, she can’t control her anger—mostly when she’s coming down, but especially while she abstains, like the other day for instance, when she wished her mother dead. The words, although she didn’t mean them, simply fell out of her mouth. I wish you would die. And what made it worse was that her mother didn’t argue—a look of defeat crossed her face, and then she walked away.  

“How was work?” her mother asks, without looking up. She spreads salami and cheese slices across the dough, leaving no part untouched.  

Celia works at a half lottery, half video store a couple of miles down the road. Its interior looks like a dingy living room with a shag carpet, the walls stained with cigarette smoke. Locals slouch in chairs and hover over tables while playing Keno, scratching tickets, and using their birthdates as lottery combinations for daily drawings. 

“You know, the usual. A bunch of drunks who’d rather bet on Keno games every five minutes than buy their kids clothes. You know there was an end-to-end rainbow out front and not one person said it was pretty? The first one I’ve ever seen. Someone came in to tell us about it and I went outside to check it out—it actually seemed to brighten up that depressing place, but the customers just ran back in from the parking lot yelling about winning pots of gold. Isn’t that hideous? When people around the world are starving?” Celia goes out of her way for these folks, answering phone calls to place their bets, befriending them, but the truth is they repulse her, spending their days in the store’s driveway sipping straight vodka while their spouses call looking for them. She knows she shouldn’t pass judgment, considering her own behavior, but at least she knows how to appreciate beauty—at least she can see a rainbow for what it is.  

“I know, honey, it’s sad.” Flour mottles her mother’s dress length apron. “But gambling is an addiction for a lot of people. A lot of them are probably out of control and don’t know what to do to get a handle on it.” 

Celia gathers that her mother knows about her habit. She recently misplaced her razor blade and tore her bedroom apart looking for it, but it didn’t turn up. Later the same day, her mother took her aside in the laundry room and said, “Celia, whatever it is you’re doing, don’t let it get out of control.”  

“I’m fine,” she answered, even though her mother hadn’t asked a question. She turned to pull crumpled clothes from the dryer, and Celia went back into her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.   

Now, she looks toward the stove, where a stainless-steel pot simmers with tomato sauce.  Her reflection stares back from the shiny metal, black circles hollowing out her eyes. She thought they would go away when she quit. Actually, she deserted the powder when a friend mentioned that the makeup underneath her eyes had smudged. Hey Celia, wipe off your makeup. Your mascara is smudged. Only, she wasn’t wearing any makeup.  

She fiddles with the pendant around her neck, made of hand blown glass, its surface smooth like a child’s marble. David gave it to her for Christmas one year—pear shaped with a black onyx stone inside, meant to enhance creativity and open the third eye. Strands of her long hair are tangled up in the chain. She spins the lazy Susan, and tomato paste, tuna cans, and Grape Nuts whirl by before she sees a box of Cheez-Its.  

“You have some mail over there.” Her mother tilts her head toward the kitchen table and folds the thinned dough as if using wrapping paper to cocoon a fragile present. She pokes each segment of the uncooked calzone with a toothpick. “We got a card or a letter from David, I’m not sure which. It’s addressed to both of us. I was waiting for you to open it. Have you heard from him lately?”

“No.” She rips open the box of Cheez-Its.  

“Didn’t you eat dinner?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re still hungry?”

She shrugs, stuffing her cheeks with the orange squares.

“Why don’t you wash your hands first? They’re black from handling all that money.”  Her mother scrunches up her nose while working on the calzone ends. “That cash carries a lot of germs.”

She doesn’t care about washing her hands, or germs. She is trying to make up for months of only biting apples and nibbling baguettes. On drugs she had no appetite, but now, even consuming full meals, she cannot not be satiated. She is starving without the constant dripping from her throat to her stomach. She is ravenous without the internal fluttering, as though a swallowtail butterfly floats from geranium to geranium inside of her belly. She is famished without the on edge feeling of teetering between laughter and crying. Sober, she suffers a hunger like never before. 

“Aren’t you going to open David’s letter?” 

She looks out the sliding glass door past the deck, to where the wind whips the birch trees. Outside, the porch light shines on newly falling flurries, shards crystallizing the brittle grass.  

She and David, her best friend, have not spoken in weeks. He has found God for the second time. This particular finding occurred after stealing morphine from the rehabilitation center where he worked, swallowing it alone in his bedroom, and hallucinating that he was being chased by the devil. After that, he looked for God again. And poof—just like flipping a light switch, He materialized.  

Celia wants to hide from God, and anyone else who is all-knowing. She covers herself up with baggy pants that hang down over her sneakers, and sometimes wears a skirt as an additional layer. She hopes God doesn’t know she’s having such a difficult time staying away from the white dust. She has become paranoid since quitting, unable to sleep most nights. When she does sleep, she wakes up to skin stiff with nightmares—flashing memories of her attempts to outrun enormous, omniscient males chasing her with gavels in hand, ready to pound. She pictures the men as two identical images, alternating from cumulus to cirrus clouds, dangling their legs over the puffy substances like children on swing sets. They circle the land with fiery eyes, listening for her secrets, and then jump off, freefalling until they land on grassy knolls and mountain tops, on their way to finding her.  

Nothing can divert her attention from the blow. Its presence lingers, like a melody hours or days after listening to it. Alternating with its presence are disruptive thoughts that plunge into her head. Someone you love dearly will die, right now, in a car. It is probably your mother. Her car is coiled around the trunk of a tree—blood spraying on the steering wheel. If you don’t stop visualizing this, it will only prove your fault—you have sent her off the road with your destructive thoughts—you have sent her crashing….  When this happens, she presses her face into a pillow, grabs her hair with her hands and pulls it near the roots, stays this way until she can unlock the images.

###

The last time Celia saw David was at his father’s house, a split level on Essex Street. No one was home, so they sat upstairs in the den. Usually, they spent their time in his dark, basement bedroom, where they melted spoonfuls of coke before smoking it, and downed bottles of Goslings without his dad or stepmother bothering them. His parents both worked long hours at a factory called Textron, and on the rare occasion when they were home, they kept to themselves in their bedroom, the waft of marijuana seeping out from under their closed door. 

This last visit though, was different. David’s honey colored hair was freshly cut and combed, his wide nose broadened by his open mouth, his freckled face paler. He squeezed Celia’s knee with his hand, like an uncle. “You’re my best friend. I want to share the light of God with you. I’ve found the Truth we’ve been searching for all of these years, and I’ve discovered that we don’t need drugs to find it. We don’t need drugs to expand our minds.” He said these words with as much absolutism as when he used to insist, “Come on, let’s just do one more bag.” With as much certainty as he’d expressed at a music festival when he insisted he’d be okay consuming mushrooms, cocaine, and ecstasy in one sitting. Shortly after, she’d found him sprawled on the muddy ground, gasping for air. She used to be the one worrying about him—when she was in a blissful, euphoric state, he always needed to take things to another level by smoking this opium or swallowing that speed—he could never get high enough.  

In the den, David stared at her intently, his eyes piercing. “Yoga and meditation, all that new age stuff you’re into, that’s the devil’s work.” She pictured the devil in lotus position, red, leathery skin, sprouting up into sun salutation, diving into downward dog, horns grazing the floor. Dante, as an instructor, coaching the class to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Please class, try to find your centers. Clear your minds.

“The devil is trying to deceive people, and he’s succeeding,” David said.

Her attention snapped back at the sound of his voice. A pain crept up her calves into her thighs, and then turned to a tingle, like small needles prickling her skin. She bent her neck to each side so her joints crackled, pulled on the hair behind her ears. She knew it was no use to argue with him—this was a recurring discussion, with words and sentences slightly rearranged.  David said, “I would give my own life for you to know and understand and follow Jesus. I’m serious.” He crossed his legs now, and cupped both hands over his top knee, changing from uncle to professor, but without the rectangular glasses dangling from a strap around his neck. He nodded, talking slowly, enunciating his words and tilting his head. He acted older, but Celia saw the same freckles she knew in elementary school, the same young skin, just a bit more weathered.  

Celia wears rings on each finger, and rarely notices them, but that day the sterling silver felt heavy, like dumbbells crushing her hands. She said, “I’m happy for you that you’ve found your inner peace. Really, I am.”  

“It’s important that you know exactly where you’re going when you die. And it could happen at any time, Celia. We never know when.” 

The cuckoo clock on the wall above the television sounded its high pitch. She told him she had to go then. She jumped up and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He looked at her disbelieving, horrified that she’d shun what he must have considered the most important lesson of her life. She couldn’t listen to him anymore. “Listen, I forgot I have to help my mother with something. She’s expecting me home. Let’s talk more later,” she said, and patted his shoulder. “Not now.” David said nothing, so she flung her satchel over her shoulder and hurried out the side door and down the steps. She didn’t look back at the picture window to see if he watched her; she didn’t want to know. But of course, they hadn’t talked again. She couldn’t bear it.  

###

Tired of listening to her mother’s pestering, Celia puts down the box of Cheez-Its and tears open the envelope. The letter is typed on blank white computer paper. She reads it aloud:

Dear Celia and Deb, 

I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas season celebrating the birth of our savior.  Celia, I really miss laughing with you and I hope we can get together more. Jesus has been doing amazing things in my life and I want to share them with you. Her shoulder blades tighten. Her stomach turns; she isn’t sure if it’s the hydrogenated oil in the Cheez-Its, or David’s words. I hope you guys will come hear me preach next week, on December 22nd, at the Baptist church in the town square.  

“I should go,” she says, folding the corners of the page. “I should support him.” She closes the box of Cheez-Its and nibbles on her bottom lip.   

“Of course, you should.”

“But that church is just so creepy, and it will be really weird to see him preaching.” She had gone to the Baptist church in the town square during David’s first finding. She even met the pastor, Earl Flacken, a small man with a greasy comb over and a space between his front teeth. When David introduced them, Pastor Earl probed her with his eyes. Ah, he seemed to be thinking. So this is the girl who must be quarantined from us good Christians. I have just the room for her, in the basement of the church, and plenty of masks for the parish. She is the “best friend,” the shadow of evil hovering over David, tempting him.

“Celia, it will be fine. I’m sure a lot of the people there are very nice.” Her mother’s eyes widen, their jade tones emanating. “And you two have been friends since the third grade. You’re like brother and sister. I’d like to go too. We’ll go together.” Her mother’s persistence is not surprising. She has treated David like a son, and she is a cheerleader for amazing things in life.  

Since graduating high school six months ago, David has been an apprentice at the church.  Celia has lived alone with her mother and worked at the lottery store, minus the month she spent in San Francisco living in a friend’s dorm room.   

In California, she began her day by wandering up and down Haight Street and heading to the ocean in the afternoons. By the water, she molded the sand with her body and sketched maple leaves by the light of beach fire flames. She attempted to cleanse in the crisp September weather.  At first, she thought the west might offer a simple life—that leaving behind old friends would persuade her to leave behind old habits, until she attended the thirtieth anniversary of the Summer of Love Festival and smoked angel dust with a bald, bearded stranger. He had befriended her while tossing out rolled joints to the crowd, but when he took out a baggy and she saw the bark-colored dust, she caved. After that it became difficult to refuse being pulled up into the hills along Haight Street to snort this or smoke that. It was then that she realized she could not escape her own skin. 

Upon returning home, she made it almost a month without the white stuff, an agonizing tooth grinding, head-aching month. That is, until Billy showed up on her birthday two weeks ago. He walked into her bedroom while she was gluing pressed pansies onto a poem she’d written.    

“Happy birthday,” Billy said, standing in the doorway.  

Billy is halfway handsome, Portuguese, with dark hair and thick brows shading his coffee bean eyes. Tiny pockmarks speckle his face, leftover from teenage acne. His cheeks are hard lumps when he smiles. Sitting cross-legged on the twin bed, Celia looked up at him.  

“What are you doing, making crafts?” he joked.

She tightened her lips and forced a laugh. “Kind of.” She shoved the poem to her side, and then set it face up on the windowsill. She wasn’t finished, but she didn’t want him to see what she’d written—all her poems were private. David was the only one who’d read any of them.  

Billy didn’t seem to notice. “I have a present for you,” he said, but he wasn’t holding anything. Not even a card. She tilted her head toward him, saw that he was beaming. He pulled a piece of plastic baggy out of his jeans’ pocket. Its ripped ends were twisted, and the bottom held the shape of the rock. An entire eight ball just for her. “Happy Birthday, Celia,” he said again. His voice was slurred, a cross between a murmur and a drawl. His narrowed, concentrating eyes made up for his lack of elocution—it was as if he wanted her to hear his words, but he didn’t have the confidence to articulate them. He placed the blow on the black cotton bedspread, just within her arm’s reach—not exactly handing it over, but seducing her as one would a dog with a red slab of beef—so she could see it, smell it, want to sniff it. So she’d salivate.    

His smirk penetrated her while he waited for a response. He looked at her as if she were naked, which is the way he always looks at her. She doesn’t like to be naked. Most days she hates her body—obsessed with the way her inner thighs are soft like gelatin and her upper arms jiggle when she lifts them. Other days she realizes she’s become skinny from sniffing powder, that her rib cage protrudes through her skin. Either way, the self-loathing is ingrained in her mind the way craters are chiseled in the moon.  

She and David used to spend a lot of their free time at Billy’s house in his loft bedroom. They’d climb the ladder to get to the room, barely large enough to fit two people. Billy’s sister often joined them, and they squeezed in next to one another on the navy blue day bed, taking rips from the glass bong and passing CD cases with lines zigzagged on them. They’d babble about music, or global affairs, like genocide in Rwanda. Their passion grew as their pulses raced and hearts palpitated. Sometimes it got so stuffy that Celia hung her head outside the room’s one window and stared down at the grassy hill in his parents’ yard. Just beyond the noisy street, she’d be able to glimpse Silver Lake, the moon’s reflection on the water lighting up the night, making everything seem clearer. Other times, she’d scribble in her journal, detailing plans to go into the Peace Corps in Africa and save women from female genital mutilation. She had endless lists of half planned, half thought out adventures in the book, and she believed she’d follow through with them some time in the future. There, in the bedroom, the future always gleamed as a far off, distant place. There in the loft, she could only see what was right in front of her—the moonlight spilling in through that single window.

When David went home, and Billy’s sister retreated downstairs to her bedroom, the two of them would stay up finishing the coke until the sun rose. By then there was no chance of sleep, so they’d lay in S shapes, like imperfect puzzle pieces, Celia faced away from him and him gripping her waist from behind until he’d stick his fingers down under her layers, and she’d orgasm over and over while they listened to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” on repeat. She stayed long after the others left, not because she particularly wanted to, but because she didn’t want to wake her mom by coming home in the middle of the night.  

She hated having to pass his parents’ bedroom to leave in the early morning. The house was the size of a cottage, and even on tip toes, she knew they could hear her walk through the kitchen. What she feared most was Billy’s father sitting in the same high back chair at a small café table in the kitchen, with no shirt on, looking at the wall. He sat there during all hours, even in the dark. His hair was shoulder length, charcoal and wild, sticking out in clusters. He drank a Milwaukee’s Best can no matter what time of day, his Santa Claus beard hiding his mouth. She usually said “hello” and he grunted in response, his thick Portuguese accent muffling his words, his eyes turning from the wall to follow her scrambling down the ladder and out the door. She had heard him mutter words to his wife, but in all the time she spent there, she never saw his father talk to Billy or his sister. He was like a sculpture in the house, prominent and silent.    

Billy gloated in Celia’s bedroom when he gave her the white birthday rock, the same way he did when she was close to climaxing, when he’d lean over her and try to get her to see his face, so she’d know it was him who was playing her clit. Of course, she knew this, but she avoided looking at him; it reminded her of how needy he was for her attention. Of how he tucked notes underneath her windshield wipers when she was at work, or how he insisted on driving her to appointments even though she had her own car. But it was easy, this being with Billy, until it became complicated.  

In her room, she smiled at the rock’s size. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do this. This was expensive.” She viewed it from different angles, circling it in her hand, but careful not to fracture it. For a moment before he’d pulled it out, she’d hoped for something more meaningful, like a piece of jewelry, but this sparkling treasure was what bound them. It had always bound them.

 “It’s a gift,” he said, and dimmed the lights. “Take it.”  

###

Two of the walls and the ceiling in Celia’s bedroom are painted black, and gold glow stickers ornament them. She often zooms in on the luminescent, spiraling galaxies in the dark, allowing them to take her out of her head for long moments, but the escape is short lived. Lately, she’s stopped staring up into the depths of outer space because it reminds her of being high, and she is trying to do everything that doesn’t remind her of that. Like eat, for instance. She eats a bowl of bran flakes in the morning, and also a banana, some kind of sandwich for lunch, and a full dinner from her mother’s freezer, like chicken picatta or lasagna. 

In her bedroom with Billy, she snatched the baggy and grabbed her large hand mirror from her dresser. “I’ll only accept this because it’s my birthday,” she said. She pulled out her sock drawer, and reached around for her silver cigarette case, the one with a dragon etched on the front. She unclasped it and retrieved her razor blade. She sat back on her bed and turned on her book lamp. She tapped the rock with the sharp silver, while Billy sat across from her on the tie-dyed beanbag.  After breaking it, she mashed the coke with the blade, and licked the side of it, careful not to cut herself, but just enough to taste its bitterness. She exhaled a long breath, relieved for a moment to have given in, to not have to battle her craving any longer. They heard her mother come upstairs and go into the laundry room, and she glanced at her bedroom door to make sure she had locked it. Her mother’s footsteps paused. They heard her pull the knob, clicking it into place, the water streaming from the pipes into the machine, and the lid slamming shut. Billy rolled up a dollar bill, tight, until it was as thin as a Virginia Slim. He moved over to the bed and sat next to her.

She sniffed hard, as if the green paper were a tube offering oxygen. She pressed the other side of her nose with her forefinger, and sucked in, a fluid and painless air entering. The sensation had been impossible to forget. She passed the mirror to Billy, who inhaled two rails and handed it back. “The fattest one, for you,” he said. She jerked her head back after inhaling the line and caught their reflections in the mirrored closet doors. She looked awkward; her face rounder than usual, her eyes bigger. She twisted the baggy up and said, “Let’s get out of here.” As she spoke, she felt the coldness drip down the back of her throat like an icicle beginning to melt. She and Billy passed the laundry room and headed downstairs. Her mother was in her bedroom off of the kitchen, folding clothes. “We’re going out for a while,” Celia called, staying near the front door so she didn’t have to face her.  

“Okay, bye kids.” Her mother turned her head, and Billy waved. Celia slammed the door, not on purpose, but because her breath had already sped up and her strength increased, the coke hitting her hard.  

Celia drove the winding road they’d nicknamed “The Maze,” a street that starts on a busier side of town and ends near a horse farm and a century old post office that resembles a small hut in the middle of the woods. She had each fork and twist memorized from years of driving its meandering path, first in friends’ cars, and then in her own. The road curves along the periphery of Stonehouse Pond, a shallow lake outlined with pines and white birches and striped maples. In the darkness, the dense snow draped the tree branches. The lake was frozen, thick enough for snowmobiles and skaters, but that night it was desolate, just a crescent moon softly lighting the crystalline surface.   

“Why so quiet?” Billy asked.

“No reason.” 

“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Celia. It’s your birthday, you deserve to relax.” Billy knew her guilt. “There’s plenty of time for stopping. What’s your rush?” He fixated on her face the way he always did, as if he wanted to say more. His eyes moved down to her breasts.  

The winter fog obscured her vision. She drove slowly around the bumpy road while taking hits from the joint they passed, its ruby head like starlight. They stopped at a yield sign and she returned his gaze for a moment. “Do you ever think about quitting? That we’ve gotten completely out of control?” Celia’s thoughts flashed to the senior prom, and Billy as her date, five years older, the two of them passing tiny bags of crystal meth back and forth under the table, taking turns retreating to the rest rooms. She remembered his scorched face on a camping trip as he sat in the back of his truck for hours in a zombie-like state, not hearing anybody speak to him, but simply repeating the words: I’m not getting up until sun goes down over and over. She saw herself alone outside of his parents’ house (he was too paranoid to emerge from the loft) talking to the police, barely stopping to take a breath while she tried to explain how someone had smashed her car’s windshield with a bat. She recalled running from police dogs at a party in the woods, almost getting tackled before reaching the road and jumping into a passing car.

Billy smiled. “Do you know that when two people are attracted to one another their pupils dilate? Yours are huge right now.”

“That’s because I’m high.” She turned her head back toward the road. “Answer my question.”

“About quitting? Of course, I think about it. I know I can get carried away. But it just feels so damn good. And I have to say, seeing you so miserable going back and forth doesn’t make me to want to do it. No offense, but you look like shit. You barely smile anymore. You used to be so lively, now you look like it hurts to talk. I’m thinking about crushing up some Prozac for you.”

She let his words, louder than usual, bounce off of her. “I don’t believe you,” she said, her eyes focused straight ahead. “I don’t believe you ever think about quitting.” Snowflakes splattered on the windshield, glowing like fireflies in the black night.  

“What are you fighting it for? You’re never happy when you aren’t high, Celia. I think you just need to accept that.” His voice was softer again, like a humming engine.    

She wanted to refuse the truth of his statement. She flip-flopped from juicing beets and practicing yoga daily, to swallowing bumps instead of breakfast. She practiced health for days and then turned back to this place, this nourishment—it used to lift her up, but the relapses only started to depress her, like starting a project you never intend to finish.

“David is happy without it,” she said.

“David is brainwashed. And, if anything is out of control, it’s your obsession with him—worrying about all his hell bullshit. He’s just done too much goddamn acid if you ask me. It’s damaged his brain.”

“He said it took a while for him. To feel like himself again. I miss him.” Her voice was scratchy, straining to utter the sentence. She and David used to talk about everything; they used to say they were getting high with the intent of expanding their minds, that they thought of themselves as seekers, although now she can’t remember what it was they were looking for.  

“Forget about David. The only way he was able to quit was to become someone else. We are who we are.” Billy put the roach in the ashtray and cracked his window. The frigid air refreshed her skin. She heard the sound of crackling ice on the lake, and laughter. Night skaters.

###

Billy calls Celia Snow White, Lady of Cocaine. He says that when her dark hair blankets his face, it reminds him of the first December snowfall, like being indoors by a heater, wrapped in  freshly cleaned fleece—that her hair smells like honey flavored milk just warmed on the stove. That her full lips, the color of strawberries, could mesmerize him for days, her pale skin taunting him and her touch numbing him. Next to her, he feels no pain. Of course, next to her, he is high. He says that she distracts him from life’s sadness—from the fact that his father ignores him, and from the reality that his mother has given up hope for a better life. That she helps to peel his inhibitions back like layers of skin; his suffering seems to fall away.

Billy put a Traveling Wilburys CD in the player, and skipped to “End of the Line.” Well it’s all right, riding around in the breeze/Well it’s all right, if you live the life you please/Well it’s all right, even if the sun don’t shine…“Celia, let’s just enjoy ourselves. I’m tired of seeing you so sad.” He cupped the inside of her thigh. His hand is small for a grown man, but that night, it gave off the warmth of a space heater, like the one in David’s bedroom, but hotter—a suffocating, sweat inflicting heat. “It’s your birthday.”  

###

For the same birthday that Billy gave her the rock, David sent a seven page letter written in purple ink—he wrote that his gift was an offering of Christ; he explained that she, who so many knew as his “best friend” no longer had a “clue” who he was, and he wanted to share the Truth.  He reiterated that there was only room for one Truth in the world. He wrote, I love you too much to see you wander with questions I have answers to. He wanted to tell her about how he’d been saved and about how she could be too. How the world was approaching destruction, and how Satan was in the midst of sabotaging its inhabitants. He included biblical quotes: If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, and confess your sins with your mouth, you shall be saved. She was not sure to whom Baptists confessed, but she assumed it must be Earl—that he assisted in the act of both creating and destroying. Therefore if man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things pass away, behold, all things become new. Just like that. The last line of the letter read, Think about how awesome it is that someone can choose to go to heaven or choose not to. When she finished reading, her pulse throbbed, and bile rose up in her throat. She ran to the toilet and knelt over it, holding her hair back in her fist, but nothing came. Her body only jerked and heaved. She rested the side of her head against the bowl and dwelled on her curse of indecision.

###

On December 22nd, Celia sits beside her mother in a shiny, red oak pew. The small choir of four sings All Hail King Jesus, and the voices sound high-pitched, almost deafening, like stray cats fighting in an alleyway. The church looks like court. Beige, empty walls instead of pretty stained-glass windows. Stoic faces staring to the front, waiting to be told by the pastor, who wears a long robe, to rise. Celia is dressed for court too. She wears a long, hand sewn skirt of patches, some squares printed with butterflies and others cut from plain red corduroy. Her hair is pulled back with an amber clip and she has taken out her pot leaf earring. 

A yellow gold cross hangs on the wall behind the stage. David is by the altar, standing next to Earl. Each time he finds God, he cuts his hair shorter and his face fills out. He is eating well again, too. And lifting weights. He looks like a short Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the same wide, flat nose, his neck a house of thick, ropy veins. “David looks good,” her mother says.  

“I know.”    

The church smells musty, the heat cranked too high, and there are no windows in sight. A ceiling fan hangs in the center of the room, but doesn’t move. Guests walk across old burgundy carpet and overflow the pews—there must be forty rows or more. A baby cries near the front, and toddlers stand on the wooden benches, trying to see the small platform where Pastor Earl waits for everyone to settle before beginning the sermon. “We are here tonight, to celebrate our savior, Jesus Christ’s birthday…” Celia purses her lips. She presses them together to avoid letting out a scream or a sigh. It has not been said aloud that she and David must stop talking, but it feels understood, in the same way that God and the devil don’t speak.   

She looks around for familiar faces, but people appear as statues, the rows filled from end to end. People continue to shuffle into the back of the church. Most of the men wear suits and the women wear long skirts and conservative blouses. Instead of a bride entering the church, Celia pictures prison guards accompanying defendants in handcuffs, delivering them to their days of judgment. One by one they wait for the judge, as tall and straight as a sky-rise, to decide their fate.  

The pastor continues, “Most of us here are fortunate enough to know the truth, and I pray for those who do not, who are part of the devil’s deception and the world’s ugliness. If you are in doubt, it is not too late to confess your sins aloud, and then turn away from them. If you do this, the Lord will save you.” Celia looks at her mother, but she seems unfazed. She is so busy smiling at David that Celia isn’t sure she even heard what Earl just said.  

The pastor continues. “Now I’m going to ask everyone in the pews to please stand up and close your eyes.” All parties rise. Celia straightens her legs and squeezes her eyes shut. “Please raise your hands up high to indicate if you are certain that you are going to heaven.” Her hands hang, bolted to her sides. Her chest vibrates, as if her heart is about to fail. Maybe she is the devil. She starts to open her eyes, thinking she can squint and peek out into the rows of people, to see how many have their hands up. Heat radiates from her body; she wonders if by touching her own skin she could scorch herself. She seals her eyes shut again. “Now please, you can all put your hands down and let us pray for those in the room who did not raise their hands, so they may be saved.” Celia keeps her eyes closed and bows her head, scratching the wood with her fingernails. 

After the minister finishes his sermon, he introduces David as his apprentice. His prodigy. The rows of people clap. At the podium, David grins and nods his head, as if bowing. He looks mannequin-like, his skin smoother and tighter, his eyes filled with biblical quotes. He clears his throat, and begins. “Thank you all for being here, and thank you Pastor, for offering me this opportunity to speak.” His voice sounds like a teenage boy fighting his way through puberty. “First, I’d like to tell you how I ended up here. How my journey to find God started, and how ultimately, I was born again.” His voice deepens.  It echoes off the bare beige walls. “I was a drug addict and I found myself engaged in what ended up being a battle for my life.”  

Celia clenches her teeth. It hasn’t occurred to her that he might share his story. Her story. “I was going through cocaine withdrawals,” he starts. “And I was in my bed for days squirming and itching and sweating. My sheets were soaked. Picture a really bad hangover and this was a million times worse. Like a bad flu. I couldn’t get comfortable and my mind was just racing. Well, I stayed in bed hoping for this to pass. And I got really depressed. The more I thought about my drug addiction, the more I realized I was actually engaged in a spiritual struggle, and I knew the devil was trying to lure me into his evil. I had been searching for something through drugs, some sort of awakening.” David points at himself when he says this, his mouth open and face stiff, wax-like, as if it hurts to speak.  

Celia avoids looking at her mother. She and David had spent most days together, all of their drug experiments together. They began selling coke before actually trying it—splitting up eight balls into grams, and keeping quarter sized twenty bags handy, riding around town like pizza delivery drivers. They started delving into their supply, and within a matter of days there was nothing left to sell, and no money earned. They’d leave school midday, and head to one of their forest hideouts—either Deer Leap or Chase’s Pond, or the fort they’d built in the woods. She’d drive while he packed a pipe of weed and sprinkled it with coke, or cut up rails on the makeup mirror she kept in the glove box, or both. They’d stop by a local pizza restaurant to steal plastic ware to gnaw, grinding their teeth so fiercely you’d think bits would drop off onto their laps, like white ceramic shards. On the weekends, he slept over her house and they walked out to the river behind it, dropping microscopic tablets, the size of pen tips, into Dr. Peppers, allowing their minds to shift into puzzling, psychedelic tunnels, never ending mazes, causing them to run into trees and bounce back, gather and lose their minds, go for rides throughout time, viewing the world as the two of them stood outside of it and waited for it to pop open. 

###

Celia squeezes the pew harder. Her fingernails feel as if they are about to flip inside out. She is in a lone spotlight on a stage. There she is, his friend, the devil. She lures him and she cannot find her way to God. She is going to drop into a pit of eternal flames at any moment. The pastor stares through her. The entire parish glares. Like Eve, she has been tempted too many times. Like Eve, she has taken the rib of man and contorted it into the shape of darkness. She has lost her way.  

“I had a vision of the holy spirit through all of this sweating and crying and torture.” He keeps returning to the sweating. Celia’s palms slip on the pew. He speaks of the years of acid trips, cocaine, crystal meth abuse, crack smoking, and lastly, his dabble in heroin. He expands a flash of her life so far, the bad choices, the wrong people, sitting in the back of Billy’s truck at Chase’s Pond at three a.m. in the darkness of the forest, huddling together to block out the cold, shivering, twitching, laughing when Billy told David his nickname should be “snowstorm,” since no amount of powder was ever enough for him—he desired a blizzard. She remembers cigarette cherries blazing brightly, like candlelight wavering—ducking from raging headlights roaring down dirt paths, hallucinating strangers over in the bushes. She recalls following one another into bathrooms at parties, eliminating lines one at a time from the back of toilets, each time pitiful and secret, exiting separately, sniffling and coughing. She remembers experimenting with pills of ecstasy for purity or mescaline lacing, and how she enjoyed a nice dopey MDMA pill complimented by lines of crystal meth, indulging in the combination, never once pausing to think about her heart stopping. She recalls canoeing in the lake across the street from Billy’s house, tweaking by the stars, searching for a glimmer of hope, dreaming of better places and of doing better things with better people. 

She watches David as if viewing a loved one who’s been reincarnated. She can’t recognize him any more than she can see the point in his speech. His body looks distorted, his head a bit too large. He spouts answers even though no one has asked a single question. He might as well be holding one of those billboards you see in the Midwest, on the freeways throughout Kansas and Kentucky, solid black with white, stenciled print, the ones that read, Thou Shall Not -God, as if the all-knowing figure was sent down from the sky on a bungee cord to hang the sign in the middle of the flat plains and cornfields. She debates running out of the church. She doesn’t know how much longer she can sit through this lecture about confessing with the mouth (yet again), the one Truth, and how upon withdrawing from drugs the Holy Spirit comes down to perform a prefrontal lobotomy. Spaghetti undulates in her stomach. David continues: “But I realized that the life I was leading was the life of the devil, and upon finding Christ, I vowed to change my mission.” He scrunches his hands into half fists, as if trapping red, fiery insects flying through the air.  

“I have to go,” Celia whispers to her mother. Dizzy, her head feels as though it is detaching from her neck. 

Her mother squints, looking worried, but nods as if she’s expected this. “I’m right behind you,” she says. Celia glances at David one last time, and for the first time tonight, he is watching her. She picks up her satchel, shakes it to find her car keys, and then, he winks. It’s a firm wink that lasts moments, right up on stage with all eyes on him. She thinks she might vomit now, as visitors turn back to see who he’s looking at. Her tongue is tingling as if it’s falling asleep. She can’t move it any longer; it fills her mouth like a lead pipe. Her eyes become narrow lenses and she loses her peripheral vision, her sight shrinking as if looking through binoculars that become black, like death.  

Celia wakes up sprawled out on the pew, one arm hanging off and the other resting on her stomach. She blinks, seeing spots, like gray ashes from a fire. Her mother and Earl are leaning over her. Earl holds a cold washcloth on her forehead. “Are you all right?” he asks. She wonders if he’s going to take her to the quarantine room now.  

She looks up at him. “I’m not sick.” 

“We know, honey,” her mother says, pressing on her cheeks. “You don’t have a fever.”

“What happened?” she asks. Earl is as short as a boy, hovering over her like an angel. She feels relaxed, as if she just had a full body massage; she doesn’t want to peel herself from the pew. She wants to close her eyes for a while. 

“You fell down,” her mother says. “You fainted, and it just took a few minutes for you to come to.”    

The congregation stands and talks, folks exclaiming surprise, looking over at her pew to see what happened, but she doesn’t care. Her unconsciousness has swallowed her worries. She looks at her mother. “Is David’s sermon over?”  

“Yes, honey. It’s over. How do you feel?”   

She lifts her head, and starts to sit up. Her body is feathery, her mind clear.  

Earl holds a gold bowl of water. He dips the cloth into it and rings it out, twisting it with his stubby fingers, and hands it to her. “Here, you can take this with you,” he says. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, thank you.” She feels revived now. She wonders where David is; he has left the stage, and clusters of people are heading toward the front of the church to go home.    

She trudges out of the building, holding onto her mother’s elbow with one hand, and holding Earl’s cloth with the other. In the parking lot, she looks up at the clouds, stretched out like cotton balls bandaging the sky so it won’t tumble down and crush her body. “Celia, are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

“Yes, really, I feel fine now.” It’s as if the fainting has made her feel more normal. 

 “I’m going to follow you in my car, just in case,” her mother says. She is too tired to care about her mother following, or David’s absence when she fainted, or the white stuff.

###

By the time she arrives at Billy’s house, she is crying. Billy sits on his day bed, facing the entertainment center, watching an interview with Bob Dylan and taking hits from his glass bong.  “It was that bad?” he asks.  

She stares at the bong’s artwork, the twirling and swiveling shapes, pink pastel clouds shading a small pond. He reaches over to the windowsill and hands her a small mirror with a curved line shaped like a frown. She cradles her forehead in her hands. Billy places the mirror on her lap, as if not knowing what else to do, and she looks up at him. She hears herself speak. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” she says. “I feel so lost.”  

He turns his eyes down, sad, almost frightened, and she knows she looks hysterical, her face tearstained and her voice stuttering. She accepts the striped straw, red and yellow and green, meant for kids’ drinks, except this one is cut in half. She traces the half circle and sniffs forcefully, the coke fighting the thick mucous caused by crying. Her nasal cavity starts to feel numb. Billy’s lamp, shaped like a hula girl, flashes shadows of light onto the dark wall. She looks at him, but she can’t seem to focus, as his image comes closer and then grows farther away. Her body feels tired and sluggish, even as her mind speeds up. It doesn’t make sense, she thinks. How heavy I feel. How weighted.  

They sit in silence for a while, Billy with his hand on her knee, while she gawks at the shadows. The objects in his room define themselves on the navy wall, the rubber tree plant, and the picture frame with John Lennon’s photo, the bong, the Hawaiian lamp, the plaid quilt in a heap on the floor. She studies the navy shapes; she has no words. Instead of her usual surge of energy, she feels stuck to the daybed, as though someone’s hands are pinning her shoulders firmly to the furniture. She scrunches her knees up and leans her head back, sinking into the padding.

Billy continues to watch the video, Bob now singing, “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.” She suspects he knows that nothing he can say will make her forget the fear inside the church, and he is right. “Look at how young Bob was,” Billy says, motioning to Bob strumming on the guitar with his curved nose and cowboy hat, wearing a black leather jacket and shades indoors, before his face became lined, his voice gruff.

They get high in silence, passing the mirror back and forth, staring aimlessly at the television. Her mind whirls, but her body feels paralyzed, as if her nerve endings have 

been singed. She wants to feel, but cannot. Bob leans into the standing microphone and sings the chorus, his mouth wide, his voice elevating to the highest notes.  

Billy mutes the television and gets up to play a CD—her favorite Beatles’ song, “Octopus’s Garden.” She has heard somewhere that an octopus has three hearts, two to pump blood through the gills, and one to supply it to the body. This song reminds her of the two of them on a good day, she and Billy planning their escape to the coral beneath the waves. She pictures them calm under water, surrounded by green and yellow and orange, schools of fish fluttering by. It seems a nice holiday from addiction. She is still slouched on the daybed and Billy begins to sing to her in a playful voice. “Celia, it can only get better.”       

She doesn’t respond. It’s nearing midnight. “I think I’m going to take off,” she says. “I’m pretty tired.”  

“You’re tired? How can you be?”

She doesn’t know how to answer this—her high is unlike the usual bursts of renewed vigor, but instead it’s a grotesque mind spin, her body in a state of numbness. She doesn’t want to be there, but she hadn’t known where else to go—she was unable to think of a place where she would find comfort or solace. Where are you going when you die? It could happen at any time.  We never know when.  

“Don’t go. Stay the night. We have an entire bag to finish.” Billy’s dark eyes plead with her. He crouches down and peers up into her face, brushing her hair out of her eyes with one hand, the other resting on her thigh. “Come on.” He waits for her response, but she can’t look at him—she looks back to Bob, but the television has gone fuzzy with black and white; the video is over.  

She begins to twitch. Flustered, she twists her handbag’s straps around one another. “No. I just want to go home.” She starts for the ladder of the loft and he moves in front of it. “Please Billy, just move. Let me go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

He holds himself there, as if he doesn’t believe her, as if they won’t see one another again. His body forms a barricade, his head ducking to avoid the low ceiling. “Celia, you keep leaving me. I’m always here when you need me, and you keep leaving me.” His eyes lower as if his puppy has just died. “Don’t you miss me? How things used to be? Simple and good?”

“Things aren’t simple anymore,” she says. She is sorry for tempting him. The ways she uses him collide in her mind: for company, for coke, for orgasms, and simply to pass time—all while he waits for her to awaken, to realize that she is in love with him, when she knows this is not going to happen. The guilt sits deep in her gut, like sludge. She bends to duck underneath his arm, but he stops her.  

“What are you doing?” he asks. He grips her elbow.  

“Let me go,” she says, and they hear his parents’ bedroom door open.  

Billy releases his grip and turns away from her. “Go then.”

She climbs down the ladder faster than she ever has before. His father’s chair is empty. As she races through the tiny kitchen to the side screen, she sees his parents’ bedroom light turn on under the door’s crack. Just as it opens, she hears his mom call, “Is everything all right?” She exits, stumbling on the cement steps, reaching the street alongside Silver Lake, where her car is parked. She doesn’t slow down until she is inside the car with the doors locked. Panting, the coke finally hitting her, she trembles as she starts the car. She sees Billy, still up in the loft, but leaning out the window. He is calling something out, but she can’t hear him.    

She presses her foot on the gas and her hands jerk the wheel as if avoiding a tree or a lamppost. She drives past Silver Lake, and wonders for a moment what will happen if she drives right into it. She cruises through the intersections of lights and signs, meandering around curves. Tomorrow’s a new day, she decides. Tomorrow, this sadness will seem like a dream. This will be over. But she can’t see any vision of tomorrow, only today, her legs and arms regaining feeling—pains shooting, cramping her muscles. She wishes her thoughts of eternal flames would vanish, like David’s old self, but she knows, like his friendship, they will linger in the margins, even if she stays clean for the next sixth months. It will take time to regain her composure, to find a sense of ease. She feels like a crated dog trying to get out each time the door opens—leaving to eat, or relieve herself, but always put back in by a violent owner, locked up and unable to escape. She is the owner.  

She arrives home, closing the front door quietly. Her mother doesn’t emerge from her bedroom. She is asleep. Celia climbs the stairs slowly, and then collapses onto her twin bed with the black comforter. She has stopped crying, but her leg muscles feel as if they are convulsing, and she can’t stop her feet from fidgeting. Balance yourself. Ground yourself in good thoughts. Her eyes will be wide open for hours. She fixates on the ceiling, becomes mesmerized by the solar system, watches the comets as they fizzle out, evanescent and dispersing into the blackness like her fleeting thoughts. The asteroids speckle the ceiling like hints of hope spotting the sky with light. The planets hang steadily, giving way to the gravitational pull as they continue their slow orbits around the radiating sun. Tomorrow.  

END