We made our flight, barely. There were only three other passengers. Just as well—I might have drawn attention to myself, shivering in the waiting room as if I’d just been pulled from an icy lake. As it was, no one looked at me. I swallowed a Xanax that kicked in just before we landed in Arlanda. We had another short layover, then boarded another nearly empty flight, to Reykjavík, without incident. I took another Xanax, and passed out.
I don’t remember much after that. It was like a walking blackout, only without the benefit of having had a drink. But somehow I got through border control in Keflavík. Fears over the novel virus had yet to hit Iceland, and airport officials there are used to drunks, which must have helped.
The next time I awoke and was fully compos mentis, it was two days later. I was in Quinn’s place, lying on his futon. The overheated room reeked of cigarettes and weed, but there was no sign of any booze. Quinn bent over me, stroking my forehead, and helped me to sit upright.
“Here, baby. Drink this.” He held up a bottle of electrolyte solution and slipped a straw through my cracked lips. “I’ve been getting some into you whenever I can. Do you remember?” I shook my head. “I didn’t think so.”
I sipped the blue liquid. “This is disgusting,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what’s disgusting.” He took the bottle and gently cupped my chin. “Watching you convulse for the last two days. I thought I lost you.”
I shuddered, my muscles contracting uncontrollably. “You still might.”
Quinn lay down on the futon and put his arms around me. “I know what it’s like. It’s gonna take a while, baby. I looked to see if I could check you into someplace here, but it’s tough. Long waiting list. And you’re American. They don’t like American junkies mooching off their health care. And this whole virus scare—things are starting to get weird.”
I spent the next few days writhing on Quinn’s mattress, begging for a drink, a bump; begging him to kill me. Gradually the tremors eased, and the gut-wrenching nausea. The craving for alcohol and speed did not.
When I was strong enough to get up and sit with Quinn at the table and eat a few bites of a proper meal, I finally told him everything that had transpired since the night I’d left him and found Tindra. I was stone-cold sober by then: a mutilated marionette, every string cut and every sticklike limb twisted into an unnatural shape. I didn’t care that another drink would kill me. But losing Quinn would mean another kind of withdrawal, one I couldn’t survive.
Another week passed. Quinn began to leave me for a few hours while he went to man the Eskimo Vinyl table at Kolaportið, the flea market where he did most of his face-to-face business. While he was gone, I searched every inch of his place, looking for a bottle, a pill, anything that might get me off. Other than a few cannabis seeds and stems, I came up cold. I chewed them, washing them down with water that smelled like rotten eggs.
I was getting better, but I was still in no condition to go out looking for a liquor store on foot. Plus, I knew Quinn would kill me if I did.
Instead, I started taking my Nikon and wandering around the wasteland of black lava that surrounded the warehouses and cell towers by Quinn’s place. I had to ration the number of photos I took—until I found another source of Tri-X film, I couldn’t squander the few rolls I had left. And I had no way of processing the film.
That would change. During those days outside, with Reykjavík’s cold wind buffeting me like a wounded bird in flight, I began to come up with a plan. I brooded on it as I lay beside Quinn each night, listening to him breathe after we’d fucked, not like teenagers but like people who’d washed ashore after a plane crash, amazed and a little frightened to find ourselves still alive. One morning as I cradled a chipped coffee mug and Quinn sat smoking a cigarette, I said, “I have an idea.”
“So shoot.”
I told him. He listened, and I saw his expression change, from dubious to suspicious to obdurate to pissed off until, finally, he sighed and shook his head.
“Christ. Hurricane Cass. You’re fucking crazy, you know that?”
I leaned forward to lock my arm around his neck, pulling him to me. “And you fucking love it.”
“You think it’ll work?”
“It’ll work.” I kissed him, tasting cigarettes and black coffee, that lingering trace of something bitter I’d known since we were seventeen. I drew away from him, took his hand in mine, and kissed one knuckle.
“I need to get straight,” I added. “Do whatever the fuck it is people do to stay sober.”
“You need to go into AA.”
“Or something. I’ll figure it out.”
“How long do you think all this will take?”
“I have no idea.”
“Will you come back?”
I looked at him, his green eyes and scarred face, clean shaven after the days in London and Sweden; the close-cropped graying hair that did little to hide the cross that had been carved into his scalp decades ago, in some ritual I never wanted to have explained to me.
“Like a bad penny,” I said, and kissed him again.