He always wondered why the needle toss-out containers stayed half full. Surely there couldn’t be that many heroin addicts in Connecticut.
The toilet seat was cold on him. He might’ve been sitting in an ocean, letting the still water flow around him. Then his feet felt solid floor. He wondered why they had needle bins now instead of ashtrays anywhere. Smoking wasn’t as bad as shooting. Not that he had anything else on him. He’d downed the last half of his goddamn bag. He hadn’t meant to. He just started with a pinch on the fries in the car, kept chasing. Snapped out of it, everything was gone.
There was nothing left to calm him now. He knew it was going to be a bad idea. There was nothing in the water-soaked plastic bag floating in a fake can of V8 in his pocket, the one the girl at the front of the restaurant confiscated on his way in, long before he came here. Some part of him knew she’d figured he was stoned. Her and the waitresses gossiped about him behind walls, somewhere. One of the girls sat with some people, nodded over at him, they all stared, they all laughed. He stayed quiet. He pretended to type on his phone. The girl had sat him at a chair with tall legs that left him floating. There was no ground beneath him. He held onto the table for dear life with one hand, tried not to scream when the waitress came. He ordered mozzarella sticks and cheddar cheese fries and a Coke and ate it and tipped her five bucks and left without a word. The fake-V8 stash can was on a shelf behind the girl’s podium. He grabbed it and walked out, his
heart beating too fast in his chest. He walked down to his car, on the deepest level of the parking garage, ate the rest. He could still hear her talking about him. He had to use the bathroom. He stumbled out of his car and walked stiffly until he found one.
He wondered if she had sliced some from the top. This was good shit. An eighth of his paycheck went into that can. If she had asked him he would’ve given her some. She was cute anyway.
He hadn’t had a girl in a solid month now. He worked too many hours-sixty a week, overnight, with a morning shift in between, bussing tables. The girls he’d known in school went off to college, laughing at the fact that he didn’t have parents who could afford to send him. Advertising was his dream job. He was funny enough for it. It required an education, a college degree. He would have to do it on his own. So he bussed tables. But there was the one girl who hadn’t laughed, who came back into town for Valentine’s Day. He hadn’t seen her in a while. She looked at him when he was scrubbing a ring of syrup from the table in front of hers.
He looked back at her and she was already staring at him. She looked at him and smiled.
That smile, her green eyes and long blonde hair, pierced through his memory and haunted him.
She was in the casino somewhere. He could feel her now, with all of this shit in his system. She was a mumbling. She was a tingle under his skin.
He looked at the shadow of the doorway. Her feet were there. She would open the door and finally whisper why she left him, the skin on her bare feet brushing against his as he looked up at her. Some part of him would realize this is the closest she had ever been.
A blink and she was gone forever. He knew he would never have another woman again. The THC inside him was truth serum. The lies of the world peeled away like an orange. He didn’t care if he looked insane.
Did he look insane? Had someone else been here the entire time? Public intoxication was a crime. He knew it was. Surely someone had called to report the skinny white boy tripping in the men’s bathroom.
Maybe they weren’t there at all.
That was the worst part-the unknown. It might drive him insane. He might already be insane. He couldn’t know. He’d have to wait until he came down. It might be fifteen minutes, an hour, a day. He knew he was too fucked up to go walking back to the car now. At least he could sleep in there. Here, he falls asleep, wakes up, still stoned, no idea what time it is, when this place closes, if they locked him inside.
He tried to think of how long he’d been in here. What time he realized he had to piss before the cold feeling in his legs would turn into urine running down his thigh and stumbled into the bathroom.
Not knowing. That was the worst part.
He was still fucked up. This was a mistake. The cinnamon rolls, the bag, the casino, everything. He had to act now. He had to move. If he sat here the Laziness would take over and he would melt into the porcelain and piss-stained tile floor, a ghost.
He couldn’t feel his feet. He craned his neck down, bricks crashing against the inside of his skull. They’re still there, attached, clean, in the same shoes. The metal bar was three inches from his hand. He stuck one up and grabbed it, the cold sending shocks like he’d just put his hand in a piranha tank. He gripped onto it for dear life and tried to pull himself up. His legs shook under him. He couldn’t feel them either. Not the pulsing sensation when they were going numb, just nothing. There could have been nothing below his waist.
He stood. He held onto the bar for dear life. He still couldn’t feel anything. He slid across the bar, the rest of him followed. Maybe he was floating. Maybe he was already a ghost. Maybe he’d just forgotten, like he’d forgotten about the girl, his dead mother, the father long gone and far away. Nobody understood him.
He had too much to remember.
The marijuana helped him forget.
Maybe if he made it out of there alive, if he wasn’t dead already, he could find somebody who knew it too. Maybe they’d know it enough that he wouldn’t need the stash anymore. They would be a godsend, an angel, really, sent to save him.
Maybe he had to put himself in hell to find his angels.
by 
Matt Mattila
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