Fiend by Peter Stenson Read Free Book Online Page B

survive. I’ve done bad things in my life, things I’m not proud of and things that won’t let me sleep sober. I remember the first time I saw somebody overdose, Frank, my best friend I’d gotten sober with, my roommate at the halfway house. We’d gone out together, relapsed, and we sat in a restroom at Starbucks and I smoked my speed and he shot his heroin. I knew he was going to die, the way his body went both rigid and limp. I stared at his freckles, ones that made him seem years younger than he was. I knew that in order to survive, to keep my habit, I had to leave him, pretend I was never there. I did. I left him propped up on the toilet, the sleeve of his puffy down coat still rolled up.
    I do what I need to, just so I can get up and do it again.

TUESDAY
1:11 AM
    Typewriter tells me to make a wish. His voice startles me, our drive nothing but silence after the gas station.
    Huh?
    He points to the clock. He says, All the same digits.
    How can he be making idle talk after what just happened? Make a wish, he says again. I look out of the car and it’s so dark and I think about a TV show I saw about what will happen to our world after man dies. How the shrines we’ve built to money and security and happiness and love will be reduced to rubble in the blink of a geological eye. I know I’mat the precipice of the most important moment of mankind’s history—fuck the invention of the wheel, the happy accident of penicillin, the fungus over Hiroshima, the Internet—because what’s happening right now, it’s biblical in scope, the end of fucking days.
    I glance at Typewriter. His lips are moving but I can’t hear him. Maybe he’s making a wish, or praying, same thing really. That the Albino is still alive? That this is all a dream? He mouths the words with a sincerity I haven’t seen in him before. And then I think of him as John, not Typewriter, a person, a son, and that’s probably it, he’s focused on his mother, because that was his moment, her passing, the moment he can’t recover from, the moment that puts his lips to glass stem.
    Pretty soon 1:11 is going to become 1:12 and it feels important that I make a wish because I’m pretty much out of other options. What comes to mind is KK—her being alive, holed up in a fortress, with enough food to last years and books to pass the days.
    The first time I ever saw her was in the psych ward in the Somali neighborhood of the South Minneapolis ghetto. I wound up in the ward because I’d dropped out of college to smoke scante and finally my parents came to the apartment they paid for after I’d quit answering their calls. They knocked and knocked while I sat in my room with all the shades drawn, trying not to breathe. They called the cops, who didn’t think an arrest was in order, just a nice trip to the nuthouse. So there I sat in my scrubs and socks with little treads. I doodled during arts and crafts. That’s when KK walked in. Just a wisp of a girl, nothing but sharp angles anda big nose and chopped blond hair, her arms pulled in tight across what little chest she had.
    I’m not sure if I believe in love at first sight or any of that shit. But I know that sitting there in a room with half-retarded motherfuckers drooling from their lithium and trazodone, whatever I felt, it was close. Like I had this need to hold her, protect her bones from her parents or drugs or whatever wouldn’t let her sleep at night, and I wanted her to think I was funny and sexy and smart and beautiful, just fucking beautiful. Sitting there while the tech introduced us to her, I wanted to be better than I was, not just to fuck this girl, but to be better for her. Guess that’s a good enough definition of love.
    Her waving really did me in. She kind of brought up her right hand all timid like. Her fingers didn’t even move. She looked around the room and then brought her face back down, her bangs shielding her from our predatory stares. But she still looked at me—two dots of