CARRIE:

“Move it already, girl. We’ll never get to Reno if you need a fucking hour to get your clothes on every morning.”

I don’t answer. I just slip on my blouse, and after the fabric comes away from my eyes, I still see another desolate morning outside the motel room window. Nothing but dust from here and all the way to the horizon. 

Jeremy is pacing back and forth behind me like a badger in a cage. “Come on … ”

I stuff the blouse into my jeans. “I don’t think I can sit in a car today. I’m sick.”

“Sure you can, honey. We’ll be off in five minutes.”

“I don’t think I can.”

He wants to touch my shoulder. I turn away from his hand and seek refuge in the bathroom. Once in there I open the toilet and try to throw up but nothing comes out. Half an hour. Fuck.

“I’m getting our stuff in the bags,” Jeremy calls from the bedroom.

I grit my teeth and look out the window above the bathtub like a bomb inspector deciding whether this is worth the risk. The decision comes, not sure from where. But now my hands are slowly—slowly—working the hinges. They still creak, of course, because nobody in this fleabag motel has bothered to oil them in a decade but eventually I get the window up. If I stand on the side of the tub without falling and breaking something, I should be able to get up and wiggle out.

Easier said than done in my condition.

“Carrie, what are you doing in there?” Jeremy pulls the door handle and his tone goes from impatient to ominous in a second when he can’t open the door.

“I’m trying to shit. Do you mind?”

“Well, hurry. I think I saw a police car in the lot before.”

“Now you tell me?!”

“Just hurry the fuck up.”

“Okay, okay.”

The window is open but there’s a problem. It can only tilt up and down, not to the side. So I can get it to horizontal position, and that’s it. Only half the space now to squeeze through. But fuck it. I heave myself up so my stomach rests on the window sill, while I try without luck to find somewhere to grab on the naked wall outside, and make myself as thin as possible. 

There’s a backyard down below with some trash containers, and then the parking lot on the other side of a rusty fence which is not in any way hiding my attempt at looking like a human turd. If somebody fetches their car right now, at this end of the lot … well, they’ll get quite a show.

“Carrie?” Jeremy pulls the door handle harder. A lot harder. “I’m coming in.”

I give one final push with my legs on the precarious edge of the bathtub and away I am.

I stick my arms out in front of me, so they hit the container before my head does. I roll over and down onto the asphalt, with the container keeling over right after me, along with used coffee-filters and half-open garbage bags.

“Carrie!”

The bathroom door slams open. I scramble to get up.

Jeremy tries to wiggle out of the window after me. “Carrie—goddammit, I’m going to kill you.”

Outside the fence’s door there are two ways. To the right, and then the parking lot and then after that the highway and then the desert. To the left and I would get to the backside of the motel building, and face more nothingness dotted with spindly emu bushes.

So I tear open the door and head for the highway, only falling twice. I’ve got my sneakers, jeans, and a blouse that might as well not exist with that chill coming in from the south. I don’t know what the hell I am doing, but there has to be a car that will pick me up. 

Something in my mind is screaming, ‘Go to the reception, idiot! Have them call …’ And something else screams, ‘Fuck that. The cops would take me along as well as Jeremy.’

But this is crazy. Stupid and crazy. Another of my damn crazy ideas. Don’t act with your head in your ass, Carrie. Think first.

They’ll write that on my tombstone, ‘Think First’.

And maybe I’ll get it soon, because here comes Jeremy bolting out the main door. And I’m wobbling around out here on the road and it’s just one long gray-white ribbon going from the borderlands and up to Gila.

And nobody is here to pick me up. Obviously. But that’s what desperation does for you.

*

So it went as well as I guess you can expect. Jeremy ran out on the icy road and dragged me back inside, and because this motel is the ass-end of nowhere, nobody saw a goddamn thing. Or heard anything. Or if they did, they didn’t care.

Once back in the room, he tried his usual sweet talk first, but I knew what was coming.

“Honey, I know you are feeling bad, but you can’t just run away like this. And where would you get the stuff, right?”

By ‘stuff’ he means the snow I use to glaze my veins several times a week now. Whatever works to get me out of this world, and stop my body from disintegrating.

It started out innocently enough, at a party of some sort, but because I was in a bad way, I guess I was more predisposed to continue doing the shit.

You don’t really need to know that much more about me. Why would you care, anyway? But yeah, okay. I guess I have to tell you I wasn’t always like this. Once I had a life, friends, education—at least, I had started one.

That was years ago. Then my best friend OD’ed. Her mind was coming apart and I didn’t know how to help her with that. Paranoid schizophrenia, the smart and understanding people in white call it. I call it the result of a family even more fucked up than mine.

So you died. And something died in me, too. I ditched the old life, the life we’d had together and ended up on the road, and thought I kind of had things figured out after a year of running around in South America like a glorified vagabond.

I went back home to the states in September 2001—yeah, that September. But we were just stuck in Miami when it happened because they grounded all air traffic. Somehow I never got unstuck from Miami. That’s where I met Jeremy.

“Maybe you need a little of it before we go?” He almost pulls me up in a sitting position on the bed, like he is getting ready to feed me the coke in a bottle like I was a baby. I just sit with my hands folded in my lap and my thoughts race. When is it going to come?

“Say something, goddammit.”

But I can’t. Everything inside me has frozen again—like always. I know I don’t want to be with Jeremy anymore, and yet I can’t live without him. Or rather without what he provides. I got no money. I ditched my family. I don’t have anyone to turn to.

That’s what I tell myself as he keeps asking and then screaming for me to answer him, and then finally the first blow comes and I’m knocked to the floor, my head almost hitting the nightstand.

*

I couldn’t sleep as usual, after snorting—and then, of course, having sex. I think.

Things are a blur, but somehow I couldn’t get that old Johnny Cash song out of my mind, “I Walk the Line”. I think it’s a love song. You loved it, dad, didn’t you? Wonder why? You never figured it out. Perhaps that’s why? 

Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking an awful lot about, and just when I think it’s all quiet in my head and there’s only the occasional sound of a car outside on the road and otherwise silent night—fooosh. Another strike. Another ‘what if’ goes through my head.

There’s a missile range nearby. I think my brother told me. White Sands. They tested a nuclear bomb there, didn’t they? My head feels like a fucking nuke went off inside it. No matter how much I try not to think, to make it all quiet, this echo still feels like it will reverberate to the end of time.

That was some good shit, Jeremy pulled out of his magic bag. I can hear him snoring next to me and I think it’s cute and then I feel the bruise on my head and for a moment I can’t remember where I got it, and then I remember, and … it’s all so fucking confusing.

But yeah, it went as it usually does.

I was on the floor and he picked me up and began stroking my hair. He was crying.

“Baby, I’m so sorry. You know how scared I am of losing you, of something happening to you.”

And I was still trying to think clearly but there … there was that nuke. It wasn’t the drugs. We did that later. It was his fucking fist, right in the back of my head.

“I … I want to get clean, Jeremy.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, but we can’t have you go cold turkey all at once. It’ll kill you.” He whispered and sniffed, like a little dog. “You know those in rehab, how they get special drugs—not the hard stuff. They get it so they can make it to the end. It’s important we find a good doctor. I know one.”

“In Reno.”

“Yeah, but I mean Ruiz—he knows all kinds of doctors.”

“I bet he does.”

“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. It’s this shit inside me, because of what happened with my father. I can’t … I wish I could … Please, say you forgive me.”

And of course, I forgave him. Like I always do. We are pretty fucked up; we have been for a while, really. And I think I will stay with Jeremy because I feel sorry for him. He is worse off than I am.

So we had sex, as we always do and I can’t remember it, only that it was kind of nice and I think I came twice. Suddenly nobody was talking about police cars and it was okay to stay another day and night. Or maybe it was the coke I had done right before. Or somewhere midways. I don’t remember. It’s all … like a storm that won’t go quiet.

But now … now I can hear another car. I can hear the fan. I can hear an insect somewhere in the fragile bushes next to the parking lot. Like … a grasshopper. Aren’t you supposed to hear grasshoppers out here?

No.

It’s winter. It can’t be. There’s nothing out there. I get out of bed and pull away the blinds not caring that I am stark naked. But nobody is out there to care. Everything is ink black, except for a lonely light in the main reception building.

I’m thinking of White Sands again and what it was my brother told me about it. And where is he now? They sent him to Afghanistan. Is there even a map of that place where he is?

There is no map of this place. I am sure of that. I mean, maybe there is, but it doesn’t show everything as it really is. Not the night, not the awful storm that is always there even if not a soul moves in this inky blackness. No souls. No grasshoppers. 

I have to figure out what to do tomorrow. I am Carrie Sawyer and this is my life now. It’s a dark well I can never climb out of.

But tomorrow … 

*

It’s still dark outside when I feel Jeremy rummage around in bed beside me. He always does that right before he wakes.

He can usually stay awake for a very long time on a single line, but I’m not even sure if he sniffed any last night or if it was just me.

Yeah, like I told you—I’m not too sure of many things, except that I got little sleep and now I feel terrible and I have to pee.

I get up and go into the bathroom. I glance at the window over the bathtub while I’m on the toilet. Some plastic strips apparently sneaked in and wrapped themselves tightly around both hinges while I was out of it. Jeremy has a bag full of them—I guess it doesn’t matter where he uses them.

Sure, I could probably get those off, but it would take time and make some noise. And … I’m not sure I want to anymore. Not today at any rate.

I mean, yeah, I was pretty sure last night. I made a run for it. But now things are clearer.

See I figure it’s like this, I’m an addict, I know. My body is burning with fire if I don’t get that stuff regularly, but it’s burning with light when I get it. One burning I want, the other I don’t. The bad one is the one that makes me feel like I’m at the stake somewhere, like a witch, only the fire is coming from inside. 

And I’m not a witch. In fact, I don’t have much magic left. I should have stayed in Columbus after you died, Lin. Finished college. Become a lawyer. Or something that looked good on a business card. Some days, Lin, I can’t even remember if I did go to college with you or if I ever opened a book at all. It seems unreal. And your idea of becoming famous didn’t exactly work out, eh? Follow your idols, even into the grave … 

And you, mom? Don’t you try that shit with me, too. You worked as a sub in primary school for so long, but always wanted to be married to the king of the hill, or just be a fucking queen in your own right. All your little projects. Didn’t matter if it was selling herbs or chakra healing. You were someone, certainly not white trash jetsam washed up on the shore of Cleveland suburbia after your divorce from dad.

There’s a reason I haven’t tried to get a hold of you. There’s a reason I am lying to you, even when you manage to catch up with me. I wonder if you were serious about going to the police, the last time we talked. Bull. You can’t understand Jeremy, not like I do.

I have to save you, Jerry. But I also need you to save myself. But the point is … even if I didn’t, I would want to save you because … if I can’t save you, what am I? Just …

I flush the toilet and hear Jeremy groan in bed. I wonder if he wants to fuck again before we drive. Should I wash?

I just want breakfast. For once I am dead hungry even though I shouldn’t be. There should be more withdrawal. But I guess it’s a gift that comes later. I’ll have to wait for it. Something to look forward to.

I open the door. “You awake, honey?”

He opens his eyes. Those blue sneaky eyes that see everything. Then he smiles. “Yeah.”

“Want to fuck again?” I open the door fully so he can see what he wants to see. I know what you are thinking, but don’t tell me I don’t have something over him. I got to use what I have. It’s the little victories, don’cha know.

He shakes his head. “We should get going.” He tries to get out of bed but stumbles. It looks funny, his long wiry body, naked and then tumbling to the floor like a circus clown. He looks up, goofy smile and all.

Then he gets up, straightens himself, and messes with his hair—it only becomes messier. And I see that his posture is not the only thing that got up. 

He grins. “Maybe we can wait a bit, grab some breakfast in the car?”

I grin, too. “I’ll grab some right now.” Then I’m on my knees.

So before you judge me I want you to know it’s not all about sex. Sex is just … I mean, it’s just a reflection of how well we fit. Of that damn chemistry. I mean—we love each other. I know I sure love Jeremy. I mean, I do. And he is so many things. I feel I’ve known him in a past life. We were meant to be together.

But he is broken, I admit that. In that way, we also fit together. And I don’t believe we are meant to go down together, I think we are meant to make it together. 

After all, if we are not, what else is left?

As he kisses the bruise on my brow, I almost forget about that weird moment in the church three years ago when I was obsessed about why your mother had bought a normal-sized coffin for you, Lin. You were only a petite 20-year-old and there was lots of empty space left. Like in your heart. 

What happened to your heart? Why couldn’t you keep it beating?

There are all kinds of crazy thoughts, thoughts you are ashamed of and some of them for reasons that are weird and crazy to others. I am not ashamed of doing coke or wanting Jeremy or forgiving him or dropping out of that life everyone—not just you, mom—had planned and which would have been admirable.

I’m ashamed of thinking about you, Lin, as if you were a ritual. Someone who stopped mattering. I’m ashamed that I stopped feeling something, maybe a year ago. Forgot. I mean, always thinking about you, sure, but not feeling you any longer. Is that a way to cherish your memory? 

No. That’s as soulless as the gesture of having pictures of grandpa and grandma in your kitchen back on Skye, lifetimes ago. Eh, dad? 

Your parents, yeah, but so many times you said nothing about them, never mentioned them, and yet you revered them as you were supposed to, because … that’s what you did. A ritual. Like with the bottle. But I guess, I am your daughter. In every way.

What would you say, dad, if you knew exactly how much shit I put into my body during a week? Would you admonish me like you always did, to take focus away from your own shit? From chasing away your first wife, and my step-brother, and then my mother? Yeah, it’s easier to bitch on others. I learned that well. 

Okay, you are right. I think a lot. Too much. And it doesn’t stop, when Jeremy puts the four-wheeler into gear and we roar over the cracked asphalt vein that is 151 to head back north. 

We have to drive for a while, and then finally, the storm quiets enough and I can think about having my mouth full of cola and fries and just that. Victory!

The sun is hovering in a pallid New Mexican sky above us, and there are only oceans of dust and gravel and small whisks of bushes all around, and we don’t give a shit now because the road is ours.

It’s morning in America, and here we are. 

*

“So what’s up with Reno?”

That question has been on my lips but I didn’t ask it. I usually just get in the car, I follow, I immerse myself in Jeremy’s jaunts, like some artistic thing. I want to be like him, to suck off his genius. I can’t do that if I ask too much.

I have this idea that I can be an artist myself. I was drawing once. Before … you died. I drew a lot. For your stories, Lin. Maybe I can again. Jeremy is smart, like you. Not author-smart, but his art is a whole different game. Jeremy can connect me.

“Reno?”

He repeats the word like it was a kind of bleach.

“Well,” he continues, briefly correcting his sunglasses, “you remember what Ruiz said- to you—at the party?”

“Which—oh, that party?”

He grins. “The very one.”

I sink lower into the front seat. The desert air around is dry and still. We are speeding. Nobody cares. The road is lonely. I feel a hunger … 

“Okay, well, I guess it’s okay that he knows me.” I fidget with my bag and get some lipstick because what else am I going to do with my hands? It’s like there’re these pin pricks in my fingers. They won’t go away. I need to take my mind away from them. And from Reno.

“Consider it a privilege,” Jeremy quips and shifts lanes. We take over a slow truck. Like a big turtle stuck on the road.

“Are we going to do a new project, baby?” I am referring to his films, of course. Those films.

He nods. “Special order for you. Ruiz is crazy about you.”

I shrug. “You never told me that before. You never tell me anything.”

“He told you.”

“That’s not—not exactly what he-”

“I … have some deals, you know.” He makes a turn. “Some things you shouldn’t bother with. Other times, I don’t want you to know, to you know, protect you. The police have been snooping again. I got this call …”

“Oh, baby, did they harass you?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing like that. They just think … well, who cares what they think, right?”

I nod. I also think of the police officer I told things for a couple of months last autumn. Since I stopped doing that, there’s been an awful quiet. I expected them to come back for me. Throw me in jail for having had drugs in my purse, for anything really. But the fat guy from Miami Dade never came back. It’s like I was just forgotten. I wonder why?

Do I feel safer because I stopped ratting on Jeremy? He still threatens to beat the shit out of me once in a while, and sometimes he does beat me. Not sure where the line is between threats and reality anymore.

But I know he won’t really harm me. I’m hurting myself. That’s my problem. He is hurting himself. We have to stick together. Maybe together we can break the spell.

*

We stop at a roadside diner just before Albuquerque. Jeremy is looking over his shoulder again. Every other minute.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah …” He is still looking, even when he is ordering. There is a low buzz from a few sleepy customers, who look like they’d rather not go anywhere again. They don’t look threatening at all.

But Jeremy gets like that sometimes.

I touch his back. “You-”

“Really, I’m okay! Let’s find a table.”

We do and it’s fries again and soft drinks and a couple of sandwiches. I’m not sure I can keep anything in me, but I will try. If I feel bad, I will have to run for the bathroom before I throw up. Once in Tulsa I didn’t make it and everybody was looking. That’s the trouble now. It’s been too long since last and my body is burning again and the only thing that will really help I don’t want. Not yet.

“You feel better?” I let the sandwich near my lips but I can’t take a bite. I look searchingly for any signs that Jeremy is going to explode again, do something that could … but no, I must not think that. I am calm. He is calming. We are going to make it.

“It’s okay.” He runs a hand through his sandy, unkempt hair. “I just thought that a car was following us.”

“Why would someone follow us? Because we have …” I lower my voice “ … because we have the stuff?” He knows what I’m going to say. 

And I know he sells a little here and there of the stuff to his high end clients, a bonus if you will. And he knows I know that. What he doesn’t know is that I have been talking to the police. 

I’m so glad that’s over now. But what if the police don’t think it’s over? They could still arrest me for possession couldn’t they? I’m not really sure how that works. I’m just sure it’s eerie that for a couple of months I’ve heard nothing from that guy, Jack. Like they forgot.

I look out the diner window. There’s dust on it and it looks like it has caught the sunlight. It’s like you see everything through a haze out there. But there are only a few cars.

Who would—

“It’s nothing, babe.” He shakes his head. “But yeah, I’m worried about you know what. We shouldn’t have brought some in the car.”

“We always do.”

“Yeah, but it’s not safe. If only people could understand that it helps—”

“Helps?” I sip cola and I try to keep my frown to a minimum. Here comes another rant.

“It helps me create,” Jeremy starts, “all artists have done it. Maybe not the same stuff but everyone has been high on something. The Beatles, Johnny Cash, Salvador Dali …”

“That was an odd combo.” I can’t help smiling and I know he loves that. I love it, too. When I feel like it. 

He dives into the small order of fries. It looks like he is actually hungry. Maybe that is good. A lady behind us swears because she can’t get a connection on her cell-phone. 

“Will there be anything else?”

We both shake our heads and the waitress, who is a bleached blonde, not unlike myself—she moves on as she should. I hear her talking to the cell-phone lady. There is something about a mast being down for repairs … 

“We should finish,” Jeremy says. “We got a long way ahead of us.”

“Baby—there’s one thing …”

“Yes.”

“That gig in Reno. What have you said to him—that I would do?”

He leans over the table, grabs both my hands. “Nothing at all that you don’t want to do.”

“But we are going to get some stuff before I do it, right?”

“Only if you want to.”

“I do it best, when I have some stuff.”

He nods, looking all serious. “We will earn a lot from this. I think this is the last time, then we can right things. Clean up things.”

“I thought you said artists needed the stuff?”

“Not like that. It’s too much.” He nods again, but looks like he is talking to someone in the distance. “Yeah, too much. Especially for you. I can see it.”

I nod, too. We both have a plan to get out of it, but not too much. I may want to save something for the weekends because when things get too difficult—I don’t know if I could manage thinking about … you or all the shit I have done so far. 

Jeremy would need to create—that’s all. So yeah, we both have a plan. We’re not like anyone else and we can manage. But we are also self-aware enough to know that we are skirting on the edge.

We agree on a lot of things and that’s the beauty of it. We can have our issues but we both know what this is about.

And then my blood freezes, because he asks, “Why did you run away, Carrie?”

“Don’t say my name. Please call me ‘baby’- anything.”

He continues, “Why?”

I shrug. The cola feels stale. Everything is stale. “I don’t know. I think it was the stuff. I thought I could … I don’t know. Sometimes it just becomes too much and I have to get away and I feel like running, escaping, even though I know I really can’t. I know-”

He takes my hands again. “We’re in this together, right? You know that? Right?”

I nod with all the care in the world. I look him in his eyes and see worlds beyond worlds and a reflection of someone … someone I think I could be. Or maybe someone I was and wanted to be, but now I’m … I need to go a bit before I can get there, but Jeremy knows who I am. He knows.

I kiss him tenderly, but quickly. “I just snapped. That’s why we do this once more and then we see a doctor, right?”

“Ruiz is a doctor,” he says, still holding my hands. “I told you.”

“Right.”

“Okay, I just wanted to know. I didn’t like what happened either, I didn’t like what happened after, but I …” Then he sobs. 

It comes like a thief in the night, stealing his smile, stealing everything from him and I know he is lost. “I just want to … do my best.”

“Oh, Jeremy …” I lean over the table and cradle his head awkwardly against my shoulder.

People are looking now and I haven’t even thrown up yet.

But that’s okay. I know it’s screwy. You have probably guessed that he loses his temper once in a while and hits me. You have probably guessed that I’m going to fuck Ruiz or some of his friends and it’s all going to be recorded. And there’ll be Jeremy’s sculptures and coke and lots of money, and it’ll be part of a single deal. Maybe Jeremy’s biggest deal. 

So what of it? What if I like it? What if I enjoy sucking a man I hardly know because it turns me on? Do you think all girls are victims—that they don’t like to get fucked hard, unless they guy wanted to marry them and give them a castle? 

And what if I enjoy feeling like I’m exploding in a thousand different lights every time I blow the snow and not someone’s hard dick?

What if I really, deeply love Jeremy? Have you thought of that? What if I am free, but I have a few problems I need to fix, like … everyone?

I tell you what; I believe it. All creatives and all free people—people like you, mom, for god’s sake—hippie! … all those people, they have been free, even if they have fucked and smoked whatever.

And they were focused.

It’s like sports, right? It’s an extreme way of life but if you do it right, and avoid too much of the really bad stuff, the really bad experiences, then you can get an all-time high—out of life.

And that’s what I want. 

Because it will heal me. I have been rotten inside but I will fly again.

So yeah, there are a few bumps and bruises—one of them here on my brow. But right now I’m embracing my man. My lovely, hurting, imperfect man, who will always come back, do better and get better. I am still on his side. Because it’s right.

You have never struggled. You have never wanted to achieve something more than your pathetic little life. You have never had any … 

Fuck it.  

I help Jeremy get up and we leave.

Look, I don’t care what you think.

I know we just need to be on our way. Maybe we won’t make it, but at least we will have tried to do something … more. Together. 

Until Jeremy, I never cared in this way about anyone.

Except you who do not judge, of course. You who never judged me. 

Where are you now?

We are out on the lot; we stumble towards the car. There’s still a hazy light in the sky, even if there is nothing between us and the sky anymore. No windows. Or bars. Just too much distance.

“Should I drive?” I ask.

He fumbles with the keys. His hands are shaking. “No, no—it’s alright. Just keep a lookout.”

“But there’s no one—”

“Just do it!”

“It’s okay. It’s okay …”

We drive.

Can you see us from up there? You who never judged me? Can you see us?

Can you see me like I really am?

You always could.

*

Photo by Kyle Cleveland on Unsplash

*

Last edited 22 Aug 2023