Journal. Undated. Weasel’s words:
(A composition book, battered and creased. The first twenty pages are filled with cramped, handwritten letters—messy and uneven, often deviating from the light blue college-ruled lines. The first couple of pages are written in ballpoint ink; then pencil takes over midsentence.
Entries are generally short—brief bursts of words separated by thick horizontal lines. The horizontal lines are bold; they’ve been traced and retraced, scribbled back and forth with a heavy hand. The entries are undated.
As the pages pass, the words become larger and sloppier, and the last couple of handwritten pages are barely legible. Left-leaning letters spill off the rule. Lines and curves refuse to meet, as if the words are losing cohesion, breaking apart and scattering across the page.
The second half of the notebook is completely blank. It is untouched by pen or pencil. It is an empty canvas, waiting for paint.)
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have done. And each hole I dig buries me deeper.
There’s something wrong with me, I know. Something very, very wrong!!!
And that’s why I belong here. That’s why I’m never getting out.
Yesterday, about three, I met Johnny and Trent in front of Mama Cass’s. They were tweaking on something, bouncing up and down like ADD children on cotton candy and crack. They had these wide shit-eating grins, and they kept glancing at each other and exchanging looks, like they had some motherfucking secret and I didn’t measure up to share. I almost turned around and left right then. It was all just bullshit, bullshit I didn’t need. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
They took my arms and started guiding me east, Trent braying that ridiculous laugh of his, like it was all so fucking funny, and they wouldn’t tell me where we were going. Just Johnny saying, “It’s a surprise. It’s your motherfucking birthday party.”
I was already feeling like shit. Last night’s Jack Daniels was a rotten lump in my stomach and I wanted nothing more than another pull. On something, on anything, to keep it all down, to keep it all settled. When I asked, they both shook their heads and Trent repeated that giggling, hysterical laugh. He told me “Just wait, buddy. Fucking wait. We’ve got something better.” Then they pulled me into the building.
The place had been a high-end fashion store before the evacuation. I would have hated it, I’m sure—all gloss and empty space.
Somebody had done a half-assed job boarding up the windows before they fled, and a lot of light still flooded in through the front, between crisscrossed planks of plywood. The glass in the door had been shattered, and the place had been looted. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to look. Sexy destruction, postapocalypse glamour. That type of shit.
Trent laughed and pointed back toward the rear of the store, where there was a short alcove lined with dressing rooms. His laugh faded into a manic giggle, and he started to clench and unclench his hands compulsively. He was fucked up—quite obviously fucked up on something hard—and there was a very bad energy coming from him.
I should have left right then. I should have run away. And there was a dim voice in my head telling me to do just that. But there was another voice in there, too, this one more insistent, telling me to continue on. (And maybe that was my true voice, trying to give me what I deserved. Doom. Destruction.)
There was a sound in the back of the room. A mewling. At first I thought there was a kitten back there, cowering in one of the dressing rooms. That’s what it sounded like, a sick, tiny kitten. Mewling, chewing on the air.
Fuck. A kitten. If only that had been it.
In the dressing room there was a kid. No, that’s not right. It was a thing, not a kid. Really, I don’t know what it was. The light was dim, but I could see that it was wearing ragged pants and nothing else. It was smaller than me, and it was cowering in the corner, shivering. Its skin was pasty white, almost glowing in the gloom. And that skin, it looked thin and brittle, like paper stretched over a Halloween skeleton.
Johnny pulled a syringe from his pocket, and Trent, still laughing like a fucking hyena, rushed }
“Help him,” Johnny said. “Hold it down.”
I moved, on autopilot, and grabbed its legs. They felt like tree branches wrapped in canvas. I held it down as it tried to kick. And Johnny
Fuck, I can’t write this. Tomorrow. I’ll try again tomorrow.
I tried to visit Taylor last night, but I didn’t make it past the sidewalk in front of the house. The front window was bright with light from a fire, and I could hear laughter from the living room. Mac’s drone. Amanda’s titter. Taylor’s voice, clear and sharp as ever.
It was cold outside and I was, mostly, sober. The whole fucking world was riding shotgun on my nerves, and I could feel my eyeballs straining to pop from my skull.
I’m really not doing well. It’s that stuff. It’s like a toxin in my blood, and it’s pooling, growing in my brain. It’s not right, nothing’s right, and the voices in the house, the laughter, after a while it started to claw at my brain.
I wasn’t welcome. I didn’t want to be there.
Back to the dressing room. That thing.
It was like a dream. You’re doing things and you can’t explain why. You just know that that’s the right thing to do. No, not right. There’s no right or wrong about it. You just know that that’s the way things happen, and you do them without thinking.
Johnny stuck the thing’s arm and pulled back the plunger. The blood, or whatever it was, didn’t draw smoothly. It was red, but not blood red, closer to red house paint, with a splash of white mixed in. And it was clumpy. The plunger would stick, and then a lump would shoot through into the barrel.
The thing was squealing. I looked into its eyes and it was terrified. Its mouth was trembling but it couldn’t speak. I don’t think it knew how. Like it was a baby, and all it could do was squeal. Its eyes were wide and terrified as Johnny drew out its blood.
When he pulled out the needle the thing stopped struggling and collapsed, limp, to the floor. Its squeal petered out. Trent and I let }
Then I turned toward Johnny and found him smiling down at the filled syringe. Trent skittered across the tiny room on his hands and knees and held his arm out toward Johnny. He was laughing, fucking laughing, and there were tears in his eyes as he pulled back his sleeve and clamped his big hand around his bicep, right beneath his armpit, making the vein in the crook of his elbow stand out.
Johnny nodded and put the needle in. He didn’t sterilize, didn’t do anything. It went straight from that thing’s vein, directly into Trent. And Trent groaned. It was a truly pornographic sound. Then he lowered himself against the wall and leaned his head back. There was a smile of pure rapture on his face and he let out a contented sigh. Looking at him, he could have been lying in a summer field, just relaxing, basking in a bright ray of sunlight. It was like he was on a fucking picnic.
The syringe was still three-quarters full, and Johnny came toward me after Trent collapsed back out of the way.
“You’ll like this, Wendell,” he said. Johnny never calls me Wendell. He calls me Weasel, like everyone else.
I started to inch back, but stopped. It was that voice again, or maybe just my body freezing up.
But I didn’t stop him. He pricked my skin and tilted the needle up, and I watched as the clumpy red liquid swirled inside the syringe. Then Johnny hit the plunger and I was gone.
It was incredible. It was perfect. There was warmth inside my veins and I could feel it, I could fell it moving inside me. It was like I was mainlining comfort, like stuffing a down blanket into my arm. When it hit my brain… I don’t know, it was indescribable. Not an explosive energy and confidence, like meth, or a mellow, numbing euphoria, like H. It was something else. It was like nothing I’d ever done before.
I fell back on my ass and braced myself up with my hands. In my palms, pressed against the ground, I could feel the city beneath me. It was like this… again, it was like comfort. Really, words fail me, and that’s all I can say. It was comfort. Comfort and happiness, the warmth of the womb, radiating up through my body. It sounds stupid to say I felt at one with the world, but I did feel part of something larger. The city, maybe. I was not alone.
And Taylor didn’t matter, the way she looked at me—hope or disappointment—the understanding and sympathy I never saw anywhere else. At that moment, I didn’t miss her, I didn’t feel ashamed that I’d forced her away. I was part of something bigger, and I couldn’t see those small things anymore. No matter how large they might look back in the real world, back down in that place where I was nothing but a tiny, weak failure, a loser sporting big thoughts and small resolve. Here, all of that was nothing.
Trent giggled again, somewhere in the dressing room. I couldn’t see where he was and I didn’t want to move my head to look around. I felt my own laughter bubbling up inside my chest and I understood him, I totally understood his braying, moronic glee. A hand grabbed my arm and pushed me down to the floor. It might have been Johnny. Or it could have been that kid, that skeletal, shivering kid with gold in his veins. I couldn’t see and I didn’t really care.
The dressing room was empty when I regained my senses. Johnny and Trent and the thing with the golden veins were all gone, and the room was dark. The sun had almost fully set.
I still felt high, and I staggered out of the store. I made my way back to the Homestead. I’ve been living here for several days now, but I’m always surprised when they let me back in. They shouldn’t. They have no reason. And, really, I don’t think anybody wants me here, just Johnny. I’m a fucking disaster. I don’t know why Terry agreed.
Johnny seemed confused when I asked him about the stuff we took. I wanted more, but he just shook his head and stared at me like I’d lost my mind. He offered me some H, but the thought of heroin made me feel queasy, like I was going to throw up right there.
“Yesterday,” I said. “You and Trent met me at Mama C’s and we went to that place, that store, right? In the dressing room?”
He shook his head. “No fucking way. Wasn’t us. We were here. We had Bailey go out and get us food. Trent couldn’t fucking move!” Trent was sitting on an overturned milk crate on the other side of the room and he started to laugh. Johnny shook his head and shot me a look, a private look, mocking Trent.
“But you pulled blood from his veins,” I said. I was getting agitated and confused. This happened, right? I didn’t hallucinate all of that shit, did I? “We shot it. It was, it was…”
Johnny gave me a really strange look, like I’d just unzipped my pants and started peeing on the floor. He actually inched away from me.
“Take this, man,” Johnny said, holding out a baggie of H. “You need it.”
I looked at the bag and suddenly I found myself vomiting, splattering acid bile across the floor, across my shoes. Just looking at that stuff and I felt queasy and off-balance, like the whole room had just tipped over the edge of a cliff.
“Fuck man,” Johnny said. “You’re cleaning that up. If you can’t hold your shit together, I’m certainly not holding your hand…”
I tried to see Taylor again last night. I made it through the front door this time, but there was no one inside. Then I heard music coming from the backyard. They were all back there, gathered around Floyd and his guitar.
I stood in the kitchen for a while, watching them through the sliding glass door. They looked so happy. They looked so far away.
I could only see the back of Taylor’s head, but she looked comfortable out there. And that new guy was sitting across from her, wearing an idiot grin. Just like Trent. I’d be surprised if there were even an ounce of brain behind that smile.
But I would have apologized to him in a second. I would have begged his forgiveness, begged Taylor’s forgiveness, if it got me out there, into that semicircle. But it wouldn’t. There was simply no way out there, no path I could take. They were just too far away.
My veins have collapsed. They’re flat as a pancake now. Just a minute ago, I was flexing and trying to work blood into my arm, but there was nothing there. I’m empty. The pinhole from my shot in the dressing room is turning dark, and I started working it with my finger and… fuck! I don’t know. It opened up. That tiny hole opened up and my finger slipped inside. There was no blood in the wound and it all felt very, very strange.
My stomach flipped as I watched my finger moving beneath my skin. All the way up to the second knuckle. I could feel suction in there, like my heart was trying to suck my finger into my circulatory system. And as I sat there, with my finger inside my arm, my vision started to dim, and my heart grew loud inside my ears, beating, beating, beating. It was a heavy, distant sound, and the beats started to fall farther and farther apart. Gray spots gathered in the corners of my closet.
I pulled my finger out and immediately I started feeling better.
There was no blood on my finger. None. Instead, it was sticky with some type of mucous or bile. Slimy. Chunky and gelatinous. Is that what’s in my veins now? Is that what my heart is pumping?
Fuck. None of this could have happened, right? It’s not possible. There’s just no way. I’m just hallucinating, right? Fuck, next the walls will start to pulse and my balls will disappear. The sun will rise in my closet and I’ll go blind.
But. But the wound is bigger and darker now, and the vein leading away from that spot is turning black. It’s like someone drew on me with a fucking Sharpie. No, it’s like someone drew inside of me with a fucking Sharpie.
I want some more of that shit. I need it! The boy with the million dollar veins. Is he still out there? Is he looking for me?
I need to feel that again. I need to push back against this stupid fucking body.
This is it, isn’t it? Game over. This is how it happens. This is how it gets you.
Fuck. I. Just
(The next page is missing. The rest of the book is blank.)