Tears brimmed in her eyes and she wished she’d never opened that metal door, had never seen this cursed hallway, that everything could simply go back to the way it had been before.
Can’t, never, I just don’t… She turned and fled, her footsteps echoing off the floor, not caring that the metal door she’d been warned about clanged shut behind her.
She hugged herself as she ran, telling herself that it had been a trick of light and shadow. It’d been dark in that little room, after all, and she did have a powerful imagination. Daddy had always told her so.
Oh, Daddy, I need you so bad. Daddy, Daddy, I need you.
By the time she’d made it back to the main hall, she’d slowed her pace a bit. She struggled to control her breathing as she slipped beneath the covers of her pallet. She lay there, crying softly, staring at the wall. She tried to understand what she’d seen on the other side of that wooden door, tried to comes to terms with what, exactly, it could mean and why it had yanked such a powerful response from her soul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Something like that will shake a person up, let me tell ya. I hightailed it outta that bar, trying my best to just blend in with the shadows of the night. Just another average joe going about his business, nothing special about me, folks. Part of me wanted so badly to believe it, I wished to God that I’d never heard of the Eye of Aeons, that I coulda just looked at Clarice Hudson and thought fuck yeah, my man… tonight’s your night!
For a second, I even cursed the day I’d ever taken up my little stay of residence in Ocean’s head. In that moment, with all those nighttime people stumbling along sidewalks and hailing cabs, laughing and practically undressing one another on the corners… in that moment, I just wanted to be like them.
Then I got this kinda sinking feeling in my bowels and I felt like I’d taken everything that poor girl had ever been through and flushed it down the crapper. I mean, I kinda brought this whole dimensional instability thing on myself, right? I went searchin’ for something exactly like what I got. But Ocean? She never asked for this shit, man. She never wanted this. It was just the lot in life that she happened to draw and she did her best to make the most of it. Fuck man, her society may have considered her a woman just ‘cause she started raggin’, but she was still just a kid, man. And she was makin’ choices a kid shouldn’t ever have to make.
Yet here I was, pissin’ and moanin’ because I was scared, because I was confused and didn’t know what to do anymore. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all. Clarice fuckin’ Hudson, and others like her, were out there condemning this poor girl to a lifetime of torment. And I just wanted to forget it all, to pretend like I didn’t know what was loomin’ just over that dark horizon we call the future? Fuck me, man. Fuck me.
By the time I got home I was good and ready for a long slow kiss from the bong, if ya know what I mean. I just wanted to ease back into my skin, to gain a little perspective for a while. ‘Cause, like I said earlier, I was in something of a pickle, ya know? That little slattern routine at Blue Moon really threw a kink into things. Fouled shit up bad. So hell yeah I wanted a buzz, man. Wanted one worse than I ever have in my life.
Problem was I couldn’t find my stash, see? I mean, I’ll admit that I’m not the greatest housekeeper in the world. I’ve got dishes piling up in the sink, four bags of garbage clustered ‘round a trashcan that looks like a landfill, piles of clothes all over the fuckin’ place. Empty beer bottles that belch out clouds of gnats if you’re stupid enough to pick one up… But I always knew where my bag was, man, top right hand drawer of the dresser, tucked away in this wooden box that’s got all these vines and shit carved into the wood. But not this time, man.
I dumped that box across my bed as if I really thought maybe my half ounce might be hidin’ beneath the rolling papers or that little baggie that has all the screens in it. Lots of receipts in the box, lots of old letters I’d started to write but never actually got around to sending, but not so much as a stem or even a seed.
Maybe I did smoke it all, smart ass. Maybe I fuckin’ did. Shit, I don’t know. I mean, this has been a rather unusual time in my life, dig? When time and space don’t apply to you anymore, you can never tell what you did or didn’t do. Things get jumbled up here in the old noggin’. The point isn’t what happened to my weed, man. The fuckin’ point is that I was out and jonesin’ like a mother fucker.
Now I got my connections but most of ‘em are honest, hardworking guys who just sling a little herb to supplement their sorry excuse for a paycheck, ya know? They got wives, kids, the whole nine to five routine. I can’t just call them up at one o’ fuckin’ clock in the morning and ask if they could spot me a thirty. That’s not cool, man.
But there’s this one cat I know… we’ll call him Steel, okay? Because he’s fuckin’ hard, that’s why. You don’t fuck with this dude, dig? He’s a bad ass, man. Got all these faded blue prison tats up and down his arms and eyes that don’t look like they ever knew the meaning of compassion. Fucker shanked this other guy once ‘cause the poor son of a bitch tried to welch on a couple hundred he owed. Didn’t kill him, but messed him up real good. Bastard never did get the sight back in his right eye.
So I only deal with Steel in emergency situations, ya know?
Has to be pretty dire shit before I hook up with the likes of him. As fate would have it, as they say, I didn’t really see that I had much choice in this situation. As long as you got the bread, you could call this dude. He’d leave his mother’s funeral to deliver the goods.
So that’s exactly what I fuckin’ did. I called up Steel and within the hour he’s sittin’ on my ratty little couch with this fat sack and at that point I just want to be alone. I just wanna smoke up, turn things over in my head, and try to figure shit out.
But there’s a certain etiquette that comes with a pot deal, ya know? I mean, you’re expected to burn one with the same fucker who just sold the shit to you. Kinda like an unspoken rule and one of the little perks of bein’ a dealer I suppose. Personally, I think it’s fucked up. I mean, who buys a value meal at Burger World and shares the fries with the clerk just because he’s the one who hooked you up with the food, ya know?
Anyhow, we suck down a bowl or two and I’m thinkin’ that the dude will leave now. But for some reason, and why I don’t know, he’s just wantin’ to hang out for a while. He’s got his head leaning back, lookin’ up at the water stains on the ceiling, and he’s talking about this bitch he fucked up because she was screwin’ around on him. And I start getting this idea, right?
I tell the dude I can dig exactly where he’s comin’ from ‘cause I suspect my lady’s been getting a little on the side, too. I’m actin’ all pissed about it, or at least as pissed as you can get when you’re head’s all swirlin’ in a cloud of herb.
“Shit, man,” he says. “Just get rid of the whore.”
And he ain’t talkin’ about breaking up with her, either. He goes into all this detail about how you can take an oil filter from a car and turn it into a ghetto silencer. Telling me how it can be modified to muffle all the expanding gas when that trigger is pulled. He says it only takes a little bit of work and lays it all out there in the open, how you gotta make sure there’s no brackets or fixtures at the top end that could fuck with the bullet, how you can fill the filter with water and then drain it to further baffle the shot, all the shit you need to build the damn thing.