Jackson, SCENT OF CINNAMON214
12 Steps and A Razor
by Emmy Jackson
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Christopher "Emmy" Jackson
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Liz Bahti woke up curled on her side, with a noxious-smelling scale of dried puke crusting her lips and cheek. Her eyes didn't want to open at first, because they were stuck closed by something that felt like Elmer's glue dried on her face. She dragged a circulation-deprived hand from underneath herself to wipe her eyes, and every joint in her body howled in protest. Painful pins and needles raced down her arm, which seemed heavier than it was supposed to be. That was odd, because as far as she could tell she was naked. Grime from the floor clung to her skin.
After rubbing her face gingerly, as if her skull would crack like an egg if squeezed too hard, Liz opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was a brackish pool of elderly vomit staining the carpet in front of her. Oh, boy. Not an unfamiliar sight. She pushed herself up and away from it with a grimace. She was on the dismally grungy floor of an equally dingy bedroom. The carpet was worn smooth in places, shiny with accumulated alcohol and vomit spills.
It was dark outside. A streetlight's cold blue glow filtered through the torn blanket that served as a curtain. The bed, sitting askew in the middle of the room, was a bare mattress rife with stains and piled high with empty beer and wine bottles. As for the room, she didn't recognize it. She was cold, too--no wonder. Liz looked around for her clothes.
She wasn't alone, from the sound of it. She heard Patrick Stewart's voice, Captain Picard, and then laughter a moment later. Someone was watching television close by. In the next room, it sounded like. The TV was too loud and it made her ears ache, even from here. "Thirteen six, nine eighteen," Captain Picard seemed to say. The voices swelled in and out of intelligibility, battering at her throbbing head. Liz moaned, and Captain Picard seemed to say, "Holy shit, is she alive?"
So she'd passed out after a party. Nothing new. The thought that she really ought to quit drinking again flickered somewhere deep in her head. She shook her head to drive the thoughts of sobriety away, and another groan escaped her parched throat. It felt like her brain was rattling around loose in her skull.
Whose house was this? Liz tried to remember whose party she'd gone to, but it was no use. She couldn't even remember who'd given her a ride. No, wait, that was wrong, it was Charlie. So this was the back bedroom of one of Charlie's friends' houses, and she'd slept the night away. Maybe the day after. No problem.
She tried to get up, but her legs wouldn't hold her. They weren't even strong enough to raise her to a kneeling position. But she had to move, had to get some water or something.
"Everyone to the lower deck," Captain Picard called. "We're not waiting around for I think I heard her moving in there." Maybe it wasn't just Picard talking. Whatever it was, it was in the other room and that made it too far away for her to think about. Liz crawled. The bathroom would be nice. She could curl up on the floor, or in the bathtub if it wasn't too nasty or already occupied. Nice and cool. It would make her head feel better, if she could get there. When she moved her body felt like a heavy, water-filled skeleton.
The doorway opened out into a short hallway, and Liz could see the light of the television flickering bluish on the walls of the living room. She discovered that she could barely even crawl straight; her hips flopped to one side, nearly useless. The effort of crawling seven feet made her stomach turn over, and she retched in the hallway. The dry heaves expelled nothing but white foam that tasted of acid and, very faintly, of gin. Liz collapsed onto her belly and wiped her mouth on her arm. "Charlie?" she called. "Charlie, I'm sick."
a little, high-pitched voice echoed. What a fucking understatement. She couldn't remember a hangover this bad.
A figure appeared at the lighted end of the hallway, blocking the TV's light. A moment later the overhead light snapped on and Liz'ss head exploded.
No, it didn't. But it felt like it had. She raised a protesting arm against the light's assault. "Hey. Who's that?" she asked.
"Dare?" the voice said.
"You're right," a man's voice said with a laugh. "She is alive. She puked in the hall, guys."
"Ah, shit," came another voice from behind the first guy.
Liz looked up at them. Their sink-bleached hair and baggy castoffs tagged them as skateboarders. That was weird. Charlie didn't know any skateboarders, that she knew of. She didn't recognize either of them, but she tried to ask them where Charlie was anyway. She wasn't sure she said anything at all that time.
"Dare na no? Charlie wa doko?"
The guys looked at each other and laughed. "What the fuck was that?" the first one asked.
The second one, the one with the deeper voice, squatted in front of Liz. He grimaced a little when he got close, making an obvious effort not to recoil from the stink of her. "Hey. Can. You. Understand. Me?" he said slowly.
She tried to glare at his condescending tone, but she was too tired; the expression never made it to her face. "Cut it out," she said, her voice fading to a gasp. "Where are my clothes?"
"Yamete yo. Watashi no fuku wa doko?" the voice squeaked, as if making fun of her. She wished it would stop.
The skater straightened and looked at his friend. "I dunno," he said. "It sounds like Chinese or something."
"Stop it," she said.
"Yamete."
"It's not funny."
"Joudan ja nai wa." Liz tried to get up, but wasn't strong enough to push herself upright. Who was making fun of her?
The skater and his friend laughed again. "That's fuckin' hilarious, man. You know anyone who speaks Chinese?"
It was her. The little squeaky voice was hers. Oh, Jesus, of course they didn't understand, she was speaking Japanese, her mother's native tongue. She'd grown up bilingual and she was so sick she'd forgotten. Liz laughed at herself a little--until she realized that she couldn't speak any English. "Where's Charlie?" she tried to say again, but it came out in Japanese--"Charlie wa doko?" She could think in English, but the proper words wouldn't come out of her mouth.
"Did she speak English the other day?"
"Far as I know. She didn't have an accent or anything."
Liz started to panic. Why couldn't she talk? Who were these assholes? She rolled over onto her belly and began dragging herself toward the TV room. If Charlie was out there, he would have heard her and come, but maybe he was sleeping or something.
"Bathroom's that way," Skater said, and pointed to an open door across the hall. He made no move to help her, which wasn't a huge surprise. Among guys like this, if you partied until you were sick, it was your problem. They preferred to stay out of the way and watch the fun. Liz dragged herself into the bathroom slowly, her arms beginning to shake with effort and her legs not even bothering to try. The bathroom would be good. She could lie in the tub, maybe. Run water over herself. Anything to get her body jump-started. Liz realized that she was hungry to the point of pain. Her throat and stomach felt as if she'd been eating coarsely ground glass.
She tried to say something to the skaters again, but couldn't get the words to come out in the right language.
Holy shit, I've gone insane, she thought. The thought should have made her smile, but it only fed her paranoia. The thoughts began to spool along wildly: where am I? what have I been drinking? how did I get here? and finally, how long have I been here? It felt like she hadn't eaten for days.
Liz reached the bathroom. She levered the door closed behind her and put her back against it, sitting on the floor. The lights were off, but she couldn't reach the switch and didn't care to for the moment.
Her stomach seized again and she fought the spasm down with a grimace. She looked around the shadowy bathroom, which was just as nasty as the bedroom had been. She wouldn't have leaned over the toilet to puke for fear of being grabbed and dragged in by some monster-bacteria. A crumpled towel hung on the doorknob, and Liz pulled it down to cover herself. Reaching for it triggered another round of dry heaves, and she couldn't stop them this time. She threw up about a tablespoon of maroon foam.
When she saw the blood she got scared for real. She called out to the skaters--at least one of whom was still outside the door, talking loudly--but she still couldn't speak in English either.
"She wants carryout!" the guy outside the door laughed. "Call Wok and Go!"
Liz wanted to call him a hundred different foul names and beat him to a pulp, but she was too weak and he wouldn't have understood her anyway. Another spasm shot through her stomach, and her arms and legs began to shake uncontrollably. Oh, my God, she thought. I'm dying. She opened her eyes and looked desperately at the ceiling.
"Iya yo," she said, as much for her benefit as for the guys outside the door making fun of her. She was not going to die naked and alone in a filthy bathroom, and they needed to be told so, whether they understood or not. "Hitori de hadaka no mama de kono kitanai toilet no naka de shinitaku nai!"
"She wants General Tso's chicken! The large order!"
Liz clenched her teeth and kept staring at the ceiling. She took a deep breath, smelling a fetid smorgasbord of sweat, puke, and stale water. She took another breath in spite of it. Liz focused on the ceiling. She had quit practicing aikido at some point and couldn't remember exactly when, but she could still center herself. And there she was. Staring at the ceiling. Wood door at her back. Liz thought beyond the weakness and pain and sickness, focused only on standing up. She was not going to die in here, not in a dirty bathroom where she'd drunk herself to death. No.
She took one more deep breath, filling her lungs and gazing at the ceiling until she could almost see the joists and ducting above it. She held it for a heartbeat. Two. When she exhaled she pushed, legs and heels bracing against the floor, and the ceiling came down toward her and just like that, she was up, on legs that wouldn't fail her.
Liz didn't think about throwing up any more--a cramp offered the option, and she ignored it. She opened the door. In the wash of light from the hallway she saw herself in the mirror. Her hair had grown almost four inches since the last time she'd dyed it; the result was shoulder-length chartreuse with black roots. It stuck up and out in unruly directions. Her face was her mother's except for her hazel eyes, too round for her to pass as full-blooded. Her father's Croatian influence was mainly in her height and temper. Her face in the mirror was filthy, with dirt and vomit. She guessed that the gritty paste gluing hair and dust to her cheeks and forehead was a mixture of dried cum and sweat. Lovely. The towel fell away from her, and she could see that she'd lost a lot of weight as well. She could see her ribs. She looked like a crack whore.
Liz didn't try to retrieve the towel; she started walking. The skater outside was three inches shorter than she was, and he grinned with lecherous familiarity. So she'd fucked him at some point, too. Or he'd done it after she had passed out. But he wouldn't help her. The amusement in his smile said that, as did the way he looked her nude body up and down.
Liz spat a wad of bloody foam at his feet and walked past him. She stayed focused on the hall past him, and the front door beyond that. She ignored the weakness and imagined a line of force pulling her to the door, pulling her hand to the knob and urging her outside. And it worked. Liz walked with surprising, fluid purpose down the short hall, in front of the television, and out the door without a glance at the rest of the skaters. There were hoots and catcalls followed by confusion; she ignored all of it.
It wasn't Charlie's house. Liz was in an unfamiliar part of Los Angeles. The small, square houses could have belonged to any of twelve neighborhoods she knew and hundreds she didn't. But she needed help, and she couldn't call 911 if she couldn't remember how to speak in English, which meant that she was crazy, and if she was crazy, then it was okay to walk naked down the street in the middle of the night and hope that help found her before a pack of would-be rapists did.
Focusing her chi got her out onto the sidewalk. Then the shakes came back. Liz bit her lip and forced herself to stay upright. On step after the other, that was all it took. There was a traffic light at the end of the block, and cars. A video store. It spilled yellow and blue light onto the sidewalk--still open. Help. The sidewalk hurt her bare feet. A dog barked at her from a fenced-in backyard as she passed the darkened, sleeping houses. A few more houses to the light. A fresh spasm brought tears to her eyes. Liz didn't throw up, although it felt like her stomach had turned to glass and shattered. One leg, then the other. She didn't look down at them. Mustn't look away from her goal. The traffic light. Just turning green. She stepped on a broken bottle, gasping in pain. Kept walking. Fists clenched at her sides. The light turned yellow, then red. She was at the video store, could see cashiers and customers. Help. Help me. Liz couldn't tell if she was vocalizing that or not, and in what language if she was. The pounding in her head had progressed from a hangover headache to a physical thing beating on the insides of her skull and drowning everything else out.
Liz drew her arm back and slapped her hand against the tall window. Again. Her arm wouldn't lift a third time, but they were looking now. She was sliding down. The warm glass rubbed and pulled her skin in uncomfortable directions and there were spots in her vision.
She was sitting on the ground again, but she wasn't alone now. Someone took her hand gently, said, "It's going to be okay." Here was okay. She could die here.
Liz let herself go. Faded out.
~ ~ ~ ~
ni
Liz woke, and didn't know where she was or how she had gotten there. There was a tube going up her nose. It wasn't comfortable, so she pulled it out. It was a lot longer than she expected it to be, and she kept pulling until she had maybe two feet of plastic tubing coiled on her chest, and before she could figure out how they had gotten the whole thing inside her head, she fell asleep again.
She woke a second time because something was chewing on her feet. When she opened her eyes to see what it might be, she was in an unfamiliar room, and there was a gallery of people looking at her out of a frame. They were waiting for her to do something so that they wouldn't die, and she was running out of time. No, no, they weren't, it was a nightmare. Liz clutched at the railing on her bed with her right arm and pulled herself toward it and the nightmare faded.
When she woke again she knew she was in a hospital. That wasn't much of a surprise. She woke from another horrible, vivid nightmare, of things crawling inside her veins and a giant monkey climbing around the outside of the hospital looking for a way to reach through her window, pull her out and eat her brain. She could remember the pitying looks the nurses and passers-by she had screamed at gave her, too. Once the delirium tremens ended, and they untied her, she called her mother.
Her mother was in a white-hot rage. When Liz called and told her where she was, Midori Bahti shouted at her daughter in Japanese. The noises of the Italian restaurant she owned filled the background at first, and then faded as activity came to a halt at the sound of the proprietor's screaming. "No more!" Midori shouted. "No more! I don't need you to call and tell me you're still alive to torment me! I am sick of you, do you understand? Sick of my daughter! I have no more to give you! You show up drunk and ask for money, or the car, or a place to sleep, and I give it to you. You go away and don't call at all until you need something, and I am not going to take it any more. You've taken too much from me! It's too much. I can't give you any more. Too many times, you've shown up drunk and asking for money. Or asking for the car, or for a place to sleep, and I always give you everything. Or you don't call at all, and you say you're sorry, that things have been hard. And worst of all, Liz, you're always getting it together." Midori lapsed in and out of Japanese; Liz barely noticed which language she was speaking. "Every time, you're getting things together, and you've got a job lined up, and you've got big plans, and the next time you're too drunk to remember them. I'll bet you can't remember even now what the last big plan was."
She tried. She couldn't.
"I am not going to take this any more. I can't help you any more, Liz. It's too much. I'll pay for the hospital, and then you stay away. Don't fly up here. If you don't stop drinking, don't come back. You hear? No more!"
"I'm going to quit," Liz offered.
"Words aren't good enough! You come back when you've done it. It makes me sick and I don't want to look at you and wonder when you're going to die. Not if. When."
"But Mama, I need help. I can't even get home."
"Why not? I thought you had a motorcycle. That green one that looked like your hair. That expensive one."
The speech would have gone on to describe exactly how expensive the bike in question was, and Liz remembered, foggily. She did have a nice bike, and it had been expensive. How had she paid for it? Midori would have insisted the money could have gone into better things, into a bank perhaps. Yeah, right. Liz didn't even have a bank account. "My bike, right. I don't want..." She wasn't sure how that sentence ended, exactly. She hadn't been sober much for the past year or two. Who knew where that motorcycle was now? She certainly didn't.
"Then call your father. Make it his turn for a while." Midori hung up on her. That wasn't much of a surprise either. Of course, her father was two thousand miles away in Michigan, so it wasn't like he was going to be able to help much. Liz didn't want to call him.
The doctor who finally came in was condescending. Liz forgot his exact words as they fell out of his mouth, but he told her that she hadn't consumed much that wasn't alcohol for months, had lost about thirty pounds, was lucky to be alive, and lucky that gonorrhea was the only disease she'd managed to catch during her binge. He told her he knew she'd gotten desperate because they'd pumped half a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of her stomach. He told her that she had reached the point at which she had to make a decision; quit or die. She wasn't going to make it to her twenty-fifth birthday otherwise.
"Twenty-sixth," she said quietly. She was already twenty-five, and her birthday was in March, six months away. The doctor didn't hear her; he had delivered his doomsday message, and was mentally out of the room already. As he left for real, something went 'thunk' against the window. Something small, light and solid, like someone had thrown a piece of cardboard at it. Liz looked, but didn't see anything.
The counselor who came to see Liz said her name was Martha and seemed to know her. There was another 'thunk' when she came in. Liz didn't remember the woman, but it wasn't inconceivable that she'd met her in another hospital room. She had straight blond hair so fine it seemed to be evaporating from her head and a perpetually worried expression. Martha was full of, "oh, Liz, how long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?" and, "you've been lucky so far," and other such pap Liz wasn't in the mood to hear. Martha said some things that made sense, too, but they were buried under a lot of rhetoric, much of it irritatingly Christian, so Liz mostly looked out the window. While she did that, she discovered the source of the thumping sound. There was a huge yellow grasshopper in her room, and it was trying to get out, leaping into the glass over and over.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
It had to hurt, slamming into that barrier over and over again. Liz sympathized with it.
Eventually the counselor sensed that she was being ignored, and left with a promise to return and "talk" later. She left an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet. The moment she was gone, Liz tore it to shreds and wadded up the pieces.
That bit of petty destruction complete, Liz folded her arms, careful not to pull her IV out, and watched the grasshopper. It seemed to have tired of slamming into the window and was sitting on the ledge. It was almost three inches long. How the hell did a big-ass grasshopper like that get to Los Angeles, anyway?
She called some friends, dialing as many numbers as she could remember. It seemed like there should have been more. She certainly felt more popular than the four or five phone numbers she could remember, although the feeling didn't last long. Charlie was too busy to come and get her. "What about the party you dropped me off at?" she said. "I almost died there, asshole."
"What are you talking about? I haven't been to a party with you for almost two months. I haven't heard from you in three weeks, and I'm kind of pissed about that. It makes me feel pretty fucking unimportant to you." Judging by the tone of his voice, Charlie wasn't surprised, just pissed off.
Didn't anyone care that she'd almost died? "Well, forgive me."
"Well, fuck, don't get mad at me. I don't know how you got there. Last I heard you were out in the Valley."
"Sorry," she said, meaning it this time.
"Whatever," Charlie replied. "Anyway, I'm headed out the door to work, so I can't give you a lift."
"What about tomorrow?"
"I'm working then, too. Give me a call when you're feeling better, and maybe we'll hit a few things this weekend. I know some stuff that's going on."
She was in no mood for a night of raves, that was for sure. House parties, either. "Well, shit, do you know Janice's number? I can't remember it."
Charlie sighed. "Janice moved to Las Vegas a month ago, Liz. Nice of you to remember." He hung up.
She ran into answering machines until she finally got through to Pogo, whom she actually woke up. Twelve in the afternoon was early for him. "Liz? How you been?" His slightly nasal voice sounded surprised to hear from her. Had she not called him in a long time either? She could remember having had a dream about him; maybe that was why it seemed she'd talked to him recently.
"Like shit. I'm in the hospital. I need a ride home."
"Aw, man. I ain't got a car, though. My brother took it to San Jose for the week." Pogo snuffled loudly. She could hear him lighting a cigarette. "How'd you end up in the hospital? Was it Valentine again?"
Valentine? Even with her fractured memory, she knew she hadn't seen him. "I haven't talked to that psycho. I got myself in the hospital. Alcohol poisoning."
"Aw, man, that sucks. Valentine wasn't there? I thought he said he was going to see you."
"He's delusional. I haven't talked to him in three months." Valentine had tried to drown her--in a public pool of all places--the last time she'd seen him. In spite of everything else that had happened, she doubted she had gotten drunk enough to talk to him again.
"You sure about that?"
"Pogo, don't mess with me right now."
Ever the submissive, Pogo didn't argue. "Okay, whatever. I can try and get a car, maybe, if you need a lift," Pogo offered. "Valentine might loan me his car. He wouldn't have to come or anything."
Another bit of information was coming back to Liz; Pogo's network of friends consisted mainly of Valentine, his brother, and herself. Anything he did was going to involve Valentine. "That's okay," she said. There was some dim unease about what Pogo might say to Valentine as she hung up, but she was too tired to think about it much.
The nurse who brought Liz'ss lunch didn't notice the grasshopper. Lunch was watery and bland, mostly fruit and vegetables in deference to her tortured stomach. Liz considered it for a long time. She was hungry, barely. She wanted a drink more. Liz could almost taste it just thinking about it, the burn in her throat and the lovely boost that took the hard edges off of the world. If she just kept it in check this time, watched how much she drank, and what she drank, she'd be okay. She could handle it...
Liz thought again about vomiting up blood, and about not being able to speak English briefly, and about her mother being so pissed off at her for all those times she'd been taken advantage of, all those times she couldn't quite remember. And she'd been drinking rubbing alcohol?
"This is not a good life," she said, speaking to whom she didn't know. Maybe the grasshopper, who seemed to agree. She still wasn't hungry, but she ate something runny and greenish anyway. Her stomach clenched around it like an oyster around a rock, considering whether or not it would accept this meager gift. Liz closed her eyes until the cramps went away.
Even as sick as she was, her mind was spinning. Fast. It was always like this; she felt like she was thinking about too many things, trying to take care of too many things. It was one of the things about real life that made an attractive alternative of being drunk and burning every possible bridge that linked her to anyone or anything. And this was where it had gotten her. She'd almost died, and no one would have noticed. The skaters would likely have tossed her body in a Dumpster and made a speed-addled adventure out of it.
She closed her eyes, but didn't want to sleep. She asked a passing nurse if she might be able to take a long, hot bath, but the gentle smile she got in return wasn't encouraging. That was well and good anyway; she was too tired to move. Liz fantasized about finding out where she had been picked up, so she could go back and kick the shit out of the skaters who had apparently been perfectly willing to let her die. And if she had died, what then? None of her friends would have known. Or been particularly upset, from the sound of it. Liz felt as though she'd killed herself but somehow survived without anyone knowing, and everyone had already mourned and gone on with their lives. As far as they were willing to care, she might as well be dead.
This is not a good life, she thought again.
It was going to get harder before it got easier. Everything always did, didn't it?
Liz had to stop thinking, or move, so she got up. There was a bandage on her foot, and a twitch of pain that said she'd cut it somewhere. Her head went light as she got vertical, as if her brain had forgotten how tall she was. Her little hospital room looked different, from this vantage. Liz hated being tall. She had to stand still for several minutes before she felt confident enough to take a step.
She stuck her finger into her lunch plate, limped to the window and smeared a thumbnail-sized dollop of mashed banana on the windowsill for the grasshopper. It moved warily away from her, making her smile. "Give you some energy," she said. "Maybe you'll break that window yet." The grasshopper wasn't impressed.
The trip to the window had made her so tired she didn't care, and Liz tumbled gratefully back into the bed. Her body's meager supply of excess energy expended, she was able to finally stop thinking for a few minutes, too.
She thought again about her life. About the ties she'd severed. She couldn't even remember why she'd run away from everyone. Had life really been that bad? She'd never been abused, or particularly unpopular, or even particularly poor. Up until the alcohol had fucked everything up, there hadn't really been anything terribly wrong with her life. And maybe, just maybe, that had been the problem, because she felt horrible anyway.
"At least now I have a reason to be miserable," Liz said darkly, speaking to the grasshopper again. She closed her eyes, and an hour passed.
Her father, when she finally decided to call him, issued an ultimatum. "Answer me one question," Ted Bahti said. "Do you want to quit? Do you want to get your shit together?"
The way he said it made the short hairs on the back of her neck rise. Her father hadn't spoken to her in his State Cop voice for years. It was the voice she imagined him using with his traffic stops--the voice that would take no bullshit. It was also a voice that seemed to know that she didn't have her shit together, and she'd always thought she'd been successful at concealing the dark underbelly of her life from him. He was never there anyway, how could he have known? "Yes," she replied, her voice much more tremulous than she wanted it to be.
"Then I will help you, and this is what I will do." He took a deep breath. "You're going to come back to Michigan."
"I figured that."
"Don't interrupt. I'll find you a job. You're going to get a full-time job, and you're going to keep it. I'll find you a place to stay, and you'll pay for that place with your own earnings. You're old enough to pay your own bills, and that's what you'll do. I'll cosign whatever you need, and I'll help you out, as long as you stay clean. You slip up, you drink so much as a single swallow of booze, and I'm through helping you. For good."
"Funny, that's what Midori said," Liz muttered in Japanese.
"In English, please."
"I said, Mom told me the same thing, without the part about being willing to help me out."
"I probably shouldn't be doing this either. You should have gotten your shit together a long time ago. I'm going to test you, too. I'm going to show up at your door as often as I think I have to, and you're going to blow a Breathalyzer for me."
She sat forward in the bed, nearly pulling her IV out. "Are you fucking crazy?" Liz gasped. "You can't do that!"
"I'm your goddamn father; I can do whatever I want. You say you want help, I'll help you, but it's going to be my way. Cold turkey. No twelve-step shit. No second chances. Because, frankly, it disappoints me to see you like this, Liz. You're twenty-five years old, for God's sake, it's time to quit partying out there in California and get on with your life."
Liz looked at the phone, her eyes tracing the cord to the wall as if there was some answer there.
"Well? What's it going to be? Yes or no?"
Fuck that. She didn't need his help. She could do everything he suggested right here in LA; find a job, work her ass off, and just quit, quit with Charlie and all the rest of them. She didn't have to be under Ted Bahti's microscope twenty-four-seven, blowing goddamn Breathalyzers like she was a DUI. No. No way.
Liz closed her eyes for a long moment, and thought about dying in a filthy bathroom surrounded by losers who didn't even know her name, didn't know her from a piece of meat. And another thought, on the heels of that--did anyone in Los Angeles know her from a piece of meat? Even Charlie? Did she have any real friends in California? Something had changed, between the Midwest and the West Coast, and she wasn't sure what it was. "My God, I almost died, you know?" Her voice came out small.
"Yeah," her father said. "But you didn't." His voice was as uninflected and stony as always. He could have given voice lessons to Clint Eastwood.
The next words came unbidden. "I want to come home, Papa. I want to come home and be someone else."
"Good. I'll get a bus ticket for you and have it waiting at the station."
"I have to take the bus?"
"Plane tickets cost money."
"Can't you just send me cash or something? I'll buy a car and drive."
Ted Bahti laughed. "Like I can afford to buy you a car! If you need one, I know a guy who's got one for sale. It's in Canton. I'll tell him to save it for you. No arguments, Liz. I'm sending you a bus ticket. See you in a week or so. Happy trails." He hung up. Neither Ted nor Midori ever said goodbye on the phone.
"Yeah, well, I love you too," she said without feeling. Liz looked at the grasshopper, which was still on the windowsill, within an inch of where she'd last seen it. It wasn't on the floor, either. Her head felt too heavy, and her shoulders and thighs and back and neck ached as if she'd spent two days in a mosh pit, but she got up again anyway, and placed another smear of banana for the grasshopper. It backed away from her again. "Yeah, big tough guy, I know," she said, smiling. When she returned to her bed and looked back, the grasshopper had approached the lump of fruit and was eating hungrily.
The nurse who checked in on her late that evening was younger, with a henna-colored pageboy haircut. She was more inclined to talk, too. Her name was Jessica. "You'll look so much prettier when your face fills out again," she told Liz.
Liz shrugged the comment off. She knew her face had gotten gaunt; she'd seen it when she was in the bathroom. "Being around my dad's house should take care of that," she said with half a smile. "Long as being around my stepmother doesn't make me puke too much."
"Aw, you'll be all right," the nurse said cheerily. "How big is the tattoo on your back, if you don't mind me asking? I couldn't help but notice."
"From the base of my neck to my tailbone," Liz said.
"Wow. Can I...do you mind if I see?"
"Help yourself. Can't help not showing it off in this gown," she replied, and leaned forward in the bed so the nurse could have a peek. A maze of Celtic thorns and curls covered Liz's back. Monarch butterflies floated through the pattern, as if it were some kind of rosebush without leaves or flowers.
"That's beautiful," the nurse said, reaching out as if to touch it but not quite doing so. "Did it hurt?"
"Gee, they injected ink into the skin of my entire back with a little tiny needle, over the course of a couple of months. You're the nurse," Liz said. "What do you think are the odds that it didn't hurt?"
Jessica smiled with a hint of mischief. "I always ask that anyway. To see if people lie about it. How much did it cost?"
"A lot. Almost two thousand." Liz suddenly wondered if having most of her back tattooed was a waste of money. Sitting here, it seemed like an act of colossal self-indulgence. Just like the rest of her life had been. Liz didn't like feeling sorry for herself. She wanted to be proud of her tattoo, and everything it represented...but just right now she couldn't be. She pulled her gown back over her shoulders.
"Do you have any more?"
"Two on my ankles," Liz said. "A Celtic bracelet on one and a Red Hot Chili Peppers tag on the other." She didn't show those off.
"I thought about getting one," the nurse said. "Never got up the courage, though."
"You'll do it if and when you're ready. It just happens." She didn't feel like helping boost Jessica's confidence about getting ink, and masked the feeling with a humorless smile, hoping that the subject would change.
Jessica smiled and nodded, sensing Liz's reluctance. "Martha tells me that you weren't interested in joining AA even after what happened to you."
Liz kept her voice as neutral and cheerful as she could. "I'm not Christian enough. All they do is get on my nerves."
"You should do something, though," she said with a look of honest worry. Liz looked into the girl's blue eyes, and saw...she wasn't sure what. Jessica seemed honestly worried that she might have to go on living in a world that didn't include Liz. It wasn't a look of someone who had a crush on her, or needed something from her, just naked, honest caring that was somehow not diminished by the fact that Jessica probably extended it to every idiot that she met.
"I know, I know. Downward spiral, all of that. I'm breaking out of it, though." Liz met the nurse's skeptical look. "I am. I'm going home. My dad's going to help me quit. I'll be okay."
She tilted her head. "You sound like you're trying to convince yourself."
"I am," Liz said. "And I'm pretty stubborn. But I'm going anyway, as soon as I get out of here. Which will be...?"
"Tomorrow," the nurse replied. "They wanted you to stay one more day for observation. You may have more hallucinations, too, as your body adjusts. You should make sure you're around people who'll support you, if you're not willing to go to AA." Liz could tell Jessica wanted to pressure her more about AA, but had decided it would be futile. Good. More people telling her what to do was just going to piss her off at this point.
She slept well. In the morning, the grasshopper was perched on the headboard. Liz shared her breakfast with it. When they discharged her and brought her some clothes from a goodwill box--grungy tennis shoes, some exceptionally ugly slacks that were too short, and a Pizza Hut t-shirt--she scooped the grasshopper into a plastic cup, covered the top with her hand, and took it with her. "Don't worry," she told the insect as it hopped frantically against her palm and the clear walls of its prison. "You need to get out of LA, same as I do. You'll just die here." The nurse at the desk looked at her like she was nuts, but she talked to the grasshopper anyway. Liz felt a little nuts, and it always felt good to scare the norms. "You'll see. I know some great, huge fields in Kansas you'll like. All sorts of green things to eat, and lots of other grasshoppers, too. You'll get laid like crazy."
Liz decided to take the bus home. Might as well get used to it, if she was taking a bus to Michigan. She opened her fingers enough to let the grasshopper breathe, but kept it imprisoned until she got home.
She smelled her apartment before she got there. She didn't have keys, so she'd planned to go in through a window, but that became a moot point when she saw that her door was standing wide open. A pungent stink of sweat and burned tortillas reached her nose before she'd even gone upstairs.
Liz wished she could remember who she might have given the key to.
san
Her apartment was destroyed. The front door was open because there was a red-haired girl in DKNY overalls sleeping in the doorway. She looked to be about six months pregnant and she didn't stir when Liz stepped over her. There was no point in waking her up. Liz's only plan was to get in, get whatever she thought she might be attached to and could stuff into a small bag, and get out. Just as well, too; judging by the look of the place she'd do well to be at the other end of the continent when the landlord came by. Whoever was here could deal with whatever rent was owed.
The furniture in the living room was a write-off (Liz couldn't remember if it was hers or if the place had come furnished). It looked like everything in the apartment had been dragged outside, left in the rain for a month, buried in sand, and then brought back in. The filth obviously didn't bother the three people who were sleeping on the couch and loveseat, however. One of them wore the castoff clothes of a career squatter, the second the remains of a halfway decent suit, and the third's sparkly dress marked her as either a hooker or a party girl. Liz made no effort to wake any of them, either. She noticed that someone had painted the television blue. The sound of flies buzzing came from the kitchen, and as she went past it to her room Liz saw a dirty Labrador retriever rooting in the overflowing garbage can. All of the windows were closed, and it was stifling. The smell of alcohol was at once overpowering and delicious.
Liz wondered if there was anything to drink. She kept a bottle of vodka in the freezer...yeah, right. Someone had torn the curtains down and taken them away--there wasn't going to be any alcohol here. Just as well. She did stop in the kitchen long enough to find an empty peanut jar to put the grasshopper in.
In the bedroom, Liz found her dresser drawers mostly dumped out by partygoers, and the mirror had been shattered. The closet had bright orange spray paint on the door. It said, "Keep out!" and Liz had a vague recollection that she had painted that herself. She had no idea when. How long had she lived here, anyway? At least a year. Longer than that. Almost two years, maybe. Maybe almost three. Shit. Opening the closet, she found its contents largely untouched, except that her Blundstone boots were missing.
First things first; she changed clothes. The donation-box clothes came off and went on the floor, and she found some gray camouflage pants, underwear, and a green T-shirt in the chaos of upended dresser drawers. The cheap-ass sneakers were exchanged for an equally cheap-ass pair of black Vans she hadn't worn since high school. She looked at herself in a shard of mirror. Better. Good enough for a bus trip, anyway.
There was a beat-up red suitcase on the closet's top shelf, mended with duct tape, and an old motorcycle helmet next to it. She threw the suitcase on the bed, opened it over the crusty sheets, and went methodically through the small closet. Some clothes she folded neatly and put into the suitcase; others she tossed in the corner, where whoever stole them could have them. Anything that wasn't going with her today she never expected to see again.
She ended up with a week's worth of clothes. It was a start. A crushed shoebox full of photographs went into the suitcase as well, along with a handful of jewelry. There was one more thing...Liz tossed the bedclothes around until she found the monarch butterfly throw pillow she was looking for. She had had it since...she couldn't remember. Grade school, maybe. It had been a birthday present from a faraway Japanese relative, back before she'd alienated most of them by growing tall. It hadn't been pilfered, but someone had thrown up on it. With a sigh, she dropped it on the floor and kicked it into the corner.
With all of the clothes out of the closet, Liz saw one more thing; a big crack in the wall, into which had been stuffed a metal briefcase. She didn't recognize it. There was a Lufthansa Airlines claim tag on the handle, and except for smears of plaster it looked new. It was heavy. One of the combination clasps was unlocked, so she pried at the edges of the case to get a glimpse inside. She could only make out tightly banded stacks of paper. Greenish paper.
There was a briefcase full of money in her closet. "Oh, shit!" She relocked the clasp and made a note of the combo; 918. She could at least open half of it again. There was a briefcase full of money in her closet. Trying to figure out where it had come from was pointless; she couldn't even remember the hole in the wall being there. Jesus! There was a briefcase full of money in her closet.
Liz took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down. Later. She could deal with that later. The desire for a drink returned, insistent as an old friend, and she shook that off as best she could too. If she could get on the bus to Michigan, she'd be out of reach of temptation fulfillment for a few hours. Maybe she could sleep. She was getting tired from all the walking around already, and now there was this damned briefcase. Her mind was starting to whirl too fast again.
Another sigh. She looked at the briefcase, then stuffed it into a filthy pillowcase, retrieved her soiled butterfly pillow, stuffed that in there with it, and went to the bathroom to find her comb.
The smell stopped Liz at the door. The bathroom was more nightmarish than the rest of the apartment. Someone had taken a very large shit in the sink, perhaps a week ago. Not that she could blame them; the toilet clearly hadn't been flushed for a month or more. The bathtub was at least a quarter full of vomit and water. Buying new toiletries was better than looking for anything in there. Less likely to result in disease, too, from the stink of it. She closed the door as she backed out.
She walked through once more, and gathered her stuff. Pillowcase, red suitcase, crappy old helmet, grasshopper in peanut jar. Good enough. Her arms and legs were aching again. The nurse had told her she needed to be sure to eat. Liz was starting to believe her. On the way out, she put her burden down, squatted by the pregnant girl in the doorway and nudged her awake. "Hey."
"Huh? Whozzat?"
"I'm Liz. This is my apartment."
The girl smiled sleepily in false recognition. "Oh, hi, I'm Cassie, how're you doin'?"
"Fine," Liz smiled back. "Listen, Cassie, I need to get some food. Give me some money."
"I don't have any," Cassie said, shaking her head. Liz guessed that she was about sixteen, and didn't want to consider anything else about her after seeing that. "Cheri does," she added, pointing to the party girl on the couch. "I think her purse is up over there somewhere."
Liz nodded and went to the couch.
"I like your hair," Cassie said. "That green is sweet."
"Thanks." She found the purse after knocking a few cushions aside, found Cheri's wallet inside, and took out thirty dollars. There was considerably more there, and Liz guessed that Cheri might not even miss it. Definitely a party girl. And oh, hello. Car keys. BMW keys, no less. Cheri never stirred, nor did her companions. There was a half-empty bottle of Boone's on the couch between them. No, wait, it looked like they each had one. Liz borrowed one, wiped the top, and took a big hit out of sheer habit, before even realizing what she'd done. She put it down, horrified at her lack of restraint. The swallow of cheap wine didn't kill her, and she tried to forget that it had happened.
"Did Cheri drive you guys here?" Liz asked Cassie.
She nodded.
"Where'd she park? I need to borrow her car."
"I don't know if you should..."
"Hey, you guys borrowed my apartment," Liz said. She already had the keys; she wasn't going to argue with the girl. She took the key and alarm fob off the ring, stepped over Cassie again, picked up her stuff, and left.
Back on the street, she pressed the panic button on the key fob until a horn started honking, and followed the noise. Moments later she was at the wheel of a white, much-newer-than-a-twenty-something-party-girl-should-be-affording BMW convertible. Liz considered driving it all the way to Michigan, but she was starting to get the shakes and grand theft auto would be the least of her worries if she didn't get some alcohol in her system soon. And she wasn't planning to do that.
She drove to Mail Boxes, Inc., put the mysterious briefcase in a big box, tossed her soiled butterfly pillow and motorcycle helmet in with it, and mailed it to her father's house. She sent it the cheapest way possible, so it would take a week or so to get there. She'd be ready to think about it in a week or so. After that Liz drove Cheri's BMW to the bus station, locked the keys in it, and sat down to wait for her bus.
Shit. She'd forgotten to eat. She bought a bottle of water and a hot dog from the snack bar. Neither did much for her stomach, but she forced it all down anyway, and then bought an apple, another dog and more water for good measure. She broke off a chunk of apple and dropped it into the grasshopper's jar. "Hang on for a few more hours," she told it. "Trust me." She noticed that she was squeezing the armrest of her chair, and stopped.
Time seemed to be moving very slowly. She had time to check out every miserable, depressing bit of disrepair and decay around her, both in the people and in the bus station. She was surrounded by unhappy single mothers, bored college students, cracked tile, knife-slashed seats, a broken monitor hanging from the wall, stained paint, ripped posters, and indifferent Greyhound employees. It was like sitting in a massive trash can; Liz meditated on the lofty metaphorical idea that someone had spilled whatever was in America's "melting pot" on the floor and left it there to rot. Much of the feeling, she guessed, was just her mood. When the bus arrived an eternity later, Liz found a seat near the middle, on the driver's side. She settled herself in by the window, put her forehead against the glass, and closed her eyes. She was on the bus now. She could crave a drink all she wanted; there wasn't anything to be had. Thank God. If she didn't get off again, she'd make it to Michigan straight. She might chew her own arm off, but she'd make it.
When she opened her eyes again the bus still wasn't moving. She noticed that the window was completely spiderwebbed with tiny, sun-induced cracks and scores. There was a small panel that covered the vent below the window, and that was broken, too. The bus looked great from fifty feet away, but up close it was falling apart. Everything was falling apart. Caught firmly in the grip of entropy, Liz put her head back and closed her eyes again. At least her seat was working.
The day had worn her out, and she slept. Bus-sleep wasn't like normal sleep though, it was more correctly described as a series of interrupted naps. The motion lulled her to sleep despite the occasional violent left to right tosses, but every time she started to dream the bus would stop and the driver would bark stop names and directions over the PA. Twice the bus stopped and they kicked her off for half an hour, exiling her to the station so they could do some mysterious "maintenance." At one station a fat red-haired teen with fingerless gloves who resembled one of the Berenstein Bears ignored her usually very effective don't-talk-to-me mien and whispered to her that he'd give her twenty bucks if she'd let him touch her tit. He needed his ass kicked but she was too tired to do it, and merely glared at him. He called her a slut and retreated.
~ ~ ~ ~
yon
Charles Saxen had just arrived in his office when the phone rang, patched through the switchboard to his direct line.
"Mr. Saxen," a cheerful voice with a vague Boston snap rang out, a bit too loud. "It's Marty Katz. Are you sitting down? I got some news for you."
Charles sighed. Martin Katz was a private investigator--at least, that was what he'd been told when he called the guy eight months before about attempting to pick up the two year old trail of his sister's disappearance. As it had turned out, Katz was an investigator of sorts, but his bailiwick was the supernatural. Katz hunted ghosts, vampires and goblins, not missing persons. As Charles believed firmly in none of the above, the men didn't have much use for one another. That didn't stop Katz from offering the services of a psychic he knew, of course. Or tea leaves. Or a number of other arcane locating methods. For six weeks he'd called Charles every few days with a new scheme designed to test his own theories and ostensibly help Charles at the same time. Clearly the ghost-hunting business didn't pay that well, and Katz needed all of the clients he could get.
"Mr, Katz," Charles said quickly, hoping to forestall the man before he got going, "as I said the last time we spoke--"
"Forget that. I said I have news for you. Two pieces. First, I have a fingerprint that most likely belongs to your sister. What was her name, Nicole?"
He sat up, surprised. A fingerprint? Katz had never provided anything resembling solid evidence before. "Nikki, that's right. Where--"
"Bank in Colorado. Not important, actually. The print came up a few days ago but she's not there. The second thing is that I also found the friend of hers you wanted to track down. Liz Bahti? She's in L.A. How long's it take to get there from San Francisco anyway?"
"What is Nikki doing in Colorado?"
"Ah, ah, Mr. Saxen, no more details till you get on the scene. You know how I work. I'll get it all for you once you get to L.A. Meet me in Westwood? I got a professor I want to talk to at UCLA."
"Mr. Katz, I can hardly just take off and--"
"Don't worry, I got a couple days. I love coming out west. Tell you what, take a day or two to clear your case load--you're a lawyer, right?--and I'll give you a call Wednesday afternoon so we can meet. Then I'll give you the whole enchilada. Trust me, it'll be worth it."
~ ~ ~ ~
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