Random non-fandom strangeness ...
The Price of Addiction
The first hit had made her skin itch.
Darby told her that might happen - would probably happen. As she had drifted in and out of consciousness, it occurred to her that this couldn’t be what everyone talked about. So, she took another. And another.
Jacob thought she was in Victoria for the week, but she hadn’t even left the city limits. Darby had hooked her up and left her alone in a clean, anonymous hotel room, far from the regular scene downtown.
Five days after she inhaled her first whiff of the bubbling smoke, she lay on the floor of that hotel room - no longer clean, but still anonymous.
She waited for the first clutches of the agonizing spasms to come, for the nausea, for the shakes, for the pain. She would embrace the pain. She would revel in it. She lay on the now-soiled carpet - eyes closed, breath hissing through clenched teeth, bracing - for hours.
The first twinge came in her lower back - a round, dull pain that sharpened as she concentrated on it. But then she reached a disturbingly steady hand underneath her spine and grabbed the object that was lodged against her back. She gave the marble ashtray a cursory glance before hauling herself to her feet.
“Well …. poop.”
She threw a colourful scarf over her hair and strode gracefully from the room and into the bright sunlight.
***************************
Life was very good for Melodie. Always had been.
The state had made sure of that. Her mother was arrested immediately after Melodie’s conception. As a long-term addict of a controlled substance - alcohol, in this case - she was held in custody until the safe birth of her child. The genetic flaws that led to her mother’s addiction had been repaired in Melodie so that she could be deemed fit for adoption. So she could be normal.
Jacob had insisted their children undergo the same gene therapy and have the same advantages growing up. So, for an additional fee, the X/Y chromosome choice was upgraded to include the elimination of key predispositions - heart disease, diabetes, obesity, poor eyesight and addiction. Like Melodie, their children would never suffer from depression, schizophrenia or the desire to perform rash and dangerous adrenaline-provoking activities. They would be normal. Safe.
She thought of her children as she tapped out a number on her cell phone. She thought of her husband.
“Jesus Christ, Mel. It’s ten in the fucking morning.”
Darby. Jacob would be very unhappy if he knew where she had gone … and whom she had seen. Not angry, though. Jacob never got angry.
Darby did.
“I’m sorry, Darby. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going back.”
She could hear him rustling under his covers while deciding what to say. She wondered briefly whether he was naked.
“You’re sure, Mel? Nothing worked?”
“I’m afraid not, sweetie. But thank you for trying for me.”
Another pause, and then, “Well, drive safely then. And, uumm, say hi to your kids for me.”
“I will.”
Sunlight slanted through the windshield of Melodie’s sensible sedan and pooled over the spotless cream cloth seats. She appreciated the warmth of it from a cool distance.
No. Jacob would not be angry.
Darby. Darby shouted and threw things. Especially if he’d been drinking. It had startled her, the first time she had witnessed one of his outbursts. He had destroyed one of the society’s precious violins.
“Fiddles!” he had scoffed, while snapping the strings. “You can’t even call this goddam garbage a fiddle!” The delicate wooden neck had snapped between his long fingers. “You think I can make fucking music with this shit?”
Anyone else would have been drummed out of the little orchestra. But not Darby. Because the mayor’s wife had been reduced to trembling sobs by his performance of Bach’s Partita No. 3. Melodie, in the front row with the rest of the piccolos, had wondered at the mascara tears rolling down the woman’s red, fleshy cheeks. There was some kind of connection there, to the sweat that dripped from Darby’s face and the way his too-long hair hung over the rose-coloured wood that sung beneath his bleeding fingertips. She watched her own small hands tap out precise time on her tiny instrument.
She quit the band the next day.
Ballet had lasted longer, had been something she had some pride in, along with her long, dancer’s legs and graceful neck, a place where precision and hard work counted for much. A lifetime of lessons and pink leotards hadn’t prepared her for a single night in a dark, smoky nightclub, though.
Darby. Again.
Darby, pressed up against a voluptuous brunette, the woman’s pale skin flashing under multicoloured lights as she arched back, secure in his arms. Their legs were tangled in each other, their bellies locked in a primordial rhythm. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, his shirt undone, damp. His hands skimmed her round thighs and slid upward under her fluttering skirt, while the woman’s pale arms wound around his neck as she shouted words that were swallowed by the thump of bass. Her red lips curled into a smile that punched a hole right through Melodie’s chest. He had laughed and pushed her up against the wall, his mouth on her neck.
Though she had never before thought deeply about her entrechat, she now found it lacking, found herself wishing for a pas de deux.
Melodie had seen him again and again, around campus, in her classes. She watched, mute, as he stumbled in late, with bloodshot eyes and pasty-green skin, and wrote with a trembling hand. His words, when he read them aloud, were meaningless to her, but lingered in her ears like half-remembered dreams. Even now, so many years later, she sometimes thought that if she held still, she could grab one or two of them out of the air around her head.
If she could just catch one, she was sure, she would be able to understand.
But there was no need for understanding, not really, as she tapped away her afternoons, writing bright, cheerful copy for a women’s-wear catalogue - meticulously detailing the design and workmanship of each one. Even flirty little skirts that fluttered loosely around a woman’s thighs.
But then she caught a word. He had used it often. She remembered.
Extraordinary.
The opposite of normal.
So, ten years after the last time she had seen him, she found him. Called him.
“Darby, I want to be extraordinary.”
He remembered her, too. She felt … pleased.
Later, over a cup of semi-rancid coffee in a completely rancid diner, he stared at her, mouth open.
“You want what?”
The ten years had not been kind to Darby. His skin held a sickly grey cast, but all she could see was the feverish light that still burned in his sunken eyes.
“I want an addiction.”
To his credit, he had attempted to talk her out of it. He painted a grim picture of sweating, vomiting, pain and guilt, of lost opportunities and time that slips through your fingers, lost. Forgotten.
All she saw was mascara tears and fluttering skirts, so she smiled at him from across the pink Formica table. “That sounds perfect,” she said, and patted his hand cheerfully.
She did, however, also threaten to make inquiries of the somewhat pungent gentleman who had been dozing on the sidewalk outside if Darby refused to help her.
As it had turned out, he had everything she needed. Darby had registered himself as an addict almost seven years ago, which meant his supply was clean.
He had also been kind enough to give her a tutorial before leaving her in the hotel room. She had watched his quick hands, his long, extraordinary fingers, bend foil, prepare syringes and crack a light bulb like the neck of a violin. His fingers bled. She smiled, remembering. Blood.
Jacob had strong hands, too. His right hand was sun-browned, the left pale from the shelter of a golfing glove. Her state-approved parents adored him, her parent-approved husband.
“Will it be strong enough?”
“If it isn’t, nothing will be, Mel.”
“Oh.”
He touched her once, with those hands, before he left her there, alone.
Now, still in her sensible sedan, the sun blazing high overhead, Melodie contemplated her slim little phone once more. It sat in her slim little hand, with perfect nails and fingers that didn’t bleed. She found herself reaching again, for words, for music, for an ache in the belly that might drive her from this place. What finally came was a shadow.
“Mel? Mel!”
She looked up into Darby’s unshaven face and glittering eyes. His smile seemed to splash down warmer than the noon sunshine. A light touch and the window descended.
“God, I can’t believe you’re still here. I can’t believe I caught you.” He reached a hand through, into the buttercream car, and touched her hair. “It’s amazing, Mel. I’ve got a contract to write a soundtrack for a movie production in Beijing. Cash upfront, Mel! This… this is what I’ve been waiting for. You’re my goddamn angel of luck!”
She couldn’t help but smile back at him, sensing that this pure, luminescent joy was, at least, partially for her. And it was almost within her reach.
“Come with me, Mel. You’re obviously looking for something … different. I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind for ten years. Come with me, across the sea, and find out what extraordinary things are out there.”
Extraordinary. The opposite of normal.
In her grasp. In her slim little hand.
“I…,”
She watched the fever burn in him.
“I…want…”
She watched his hand on hers, on the steering wheel. Her body twitched with fear, with dark foreboding, with nausea, with pain.
“I can’t go, Darby.”
Guilt and lost opportunities and time that slips through your fingers. Lost. Forgotten.
She picked up her little cell phone and dialled.
“Jacob? Good news. I managed to catch an earlier flight. I’ll be home soon.”