I STAND UNDER A RAINTREE by the curb of the hospital. I watch for the silver glint of Gabriel’s pickup in the lowering sun. The air smells vacant with dusk. I can fill it with anything. I can fill it with you, Gabriel—touching the skin on my shoulder. Since I didn’t bring my addict-clothes to the hospital, just before leaving my room I split the seam of my STRANDED ON THE STRAND T-shirt to expose my shoulder.
I sit on the curb. My untied laces look like pieces of trash. I haven’t been outside at this hour since coming to the hospital. Nights are cooler. I imagine that next time I meet Rick at the Rainbow Motel we won’t need air-conditioning. The swimming pool will be empty. The smell of chlorine will drain from the air. For twenty-four hours after I leave there, I always smell it in my hair. Now, I think, next time I meet Rick I’ll smell particles of burning dust from the heater. Yes, I still have Rick and the Rainbow Motel…if Gabriel doesn’t show up.
The traffic hum is distant, as if no silver truck will ever near me. The rising moon tangles in the top branches of raintrees and pines, unable to shake loose and continue on a smooth journey. In the morning, I know, the sun will be too gummy and sullen to shine.
I wrap my fingers around my arms and shiver. Soon it’ll be too cool to wear T-shirts at night, and I imagine mine on a clothesline all winter. Frigid. Rough. Wrinkles frozen in place. All winter the air from my lungs will taste like smoke and sulfur and rust.
I want to dissolve myself from this place. I can do this. If Gabriel doesn’t come for me, my mind will travel to him—will cross the parking lot, the street, float down highways and across the universe…to hear him in faint vibrations from the moon, to taste him in moist veins of magnolia leaves as we journey straight to the heart of a destiny that always smells of desire and dusk….
I imagine you, conjure you, into the kind of man who needs me. You’re close to me, even closer, inside my head. Inside a trance…where I soothe myself with the pulse of my nighttime metabolism. In it, you will love me, desire me. You will soothe me through this night.
Slipping inside this trance, inside the addiction, is like slipping into a sphere where reality, guided by suns and moons, stops, and another reality, over which I have total control, because it exists only in my mind, begins. It is a fifth dimension, a secret room I enter and rearrange as if it is real space. If I don’t like one particular section of it, I knock down a wall and rip out a ceiling. I reconstruct reality. I renovate and create it. In this trance, using the superhuman strength of the addict “me,” I’m carried far beyond structured boundaries of life, beyond parameters of denotative language, signs, symbols, removing myself from a space I don’t want to be in—this parking lot—to another one, now, with Gabriel….
In a foreign universe. The color of saffron. We meet in the Hotel Majestic. He lies in a room, waiting. I hear his heart beating, echoing down the hall. I feel it, disturbing and erratic, along the floorboards to the soles of my bare feet, up my legs to my stomach, higher, until it pounds my own heart.
I cross the threshold. He lies in bed. The window is open and a marquisette curtain flutters. I see his black hair, the turquoise earring, the scar. I imagine my garnet fingernail tracing the scar, soothing it. He pours a glass of green crème de menthe. It wets my lips. I push it aside—not needing it. He pulls back the sheet and I nod, yes, this. We must explode our bodies out windows to our own planets, rocketing high to dark dimensions, not drinking crème de menthe…rather he is alcohol, and still we’re rising higher toward spheres, toward secret rooms, toward that particular drink, where hands, as they stroke, numb what is feared, anesthetize what is lonely, suffuse what is empty…a sweet narcotic rush flooding my senses…plummeting me to numbness, to nothing, a massive emotional hemorrhage I crave. I believe I must cross thresholds to find these men, will always have to enter these rooms in order to feel love. In order to feel alive.
I hear a voice behind me. It is Ted leaving the hospital. “Come inside,” he says. “There’s nothing for you out here.”
He is right. All I feel—all that’s out here—is the cool cement curb beneath my legs.
He is right: there’s nothing for me out here because all I really need to enter the addiction are the fantasies and desires inside my own head.
In many ways, I must know that my fantasy Gabriel is better than the real Gabriel. Surely, I’d rather meet him in the Hotel Majestic of my dreams than in his real silver pickup. Otherwise, right now he’d be dropping me off back at the hospital. I’d have to hear the truck door slam behind me. I’d have to watch him pull from the parking lot and drive away.
And I must also know that the fantasy Rick is better than our assignation in the Rainbow Motel. With Rick tucked securely in my head from Friday morning to Wednesday evening, I go to the drugstore searching for the perfect shade of nail polish—heart-stopping red, silvery starlight, glittery plum—which will make him love me forever. From Friday to Wednesday I plan whether to wear red silk underwear or lacy lavender. I try each on before the mirror in my bedroom and examine my body. I buy new shampoos, lotions, soaps. One of these, I convince myself, will make him crave me. In this mental isolation in which I live, I can ignore everything unless it has to do with Rick: my obsession. I don’t want to know I use fantasy to distract me from real life.
By Tuesday of each week, Rick calls once a day. By Wednesday he is calling twice, whispering into the phone what he wants to do to my body on Thursday. This is the time I feel most strong and powerful—when I know he once again needs me—even though the power isn’t mine, but belongs to my addictwoman. On Wednesdays, in my fantasy, I’m too high to remember that when he drives away from me on Thursdays, he never looks back.
Fantasies are more faithful, keep me faithful company.
Except here I am, alone on a curb outside the hospital. No man, no fantasy, no desire, no high.
There’s nothing for you out here.
I ride the elevator back up to the sixth floor and go to the lobby across from the unit. The room is deserted, lit only by a small bulb attached to an aquarium atop a coffee table. I sit on the couch. Gold and black fish dart back and forth, up and down—trapped inside glass—nowhere to go.