I’d been asleep I don’t know how long, maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour, all of it restless, dreamless, and then I heard a throat clearing, a toilet, a faucet, footsteps creaking on a hard-wood floor. And then someone was standing over me.
Hey.
My eyelids click when they open and I feel every vein, jagged red and choking. It’s Trudy upside down, uncombed hair hanging in her face, wearing a U2 T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. Oh my god. Who is this person and what have we done together?
“Hey,” she says again.
“Hi.” My voice barely a whisper, tongue swollen and dry. Every taste bud feels as big as a plate. I clear my throat and say: “I don’t think I can move.”
She says: “Here lemme help you.”
And then whoa, I’m upright again and the old blood is working.
I can’t believe I’m still alive.
Trudy sits and together we look out the window.
“Are you hungry?” she says. “Water,” I say. “Hydration. Good idea. Wait here.”
She comes back with two plastic McDonald’s Supersize cups filled with still-fizzing tap water. I drink it all down in a couple gulps and instantly have to piss.
“Is there a... bathroom?”
She points the way, swishing water in her mouth, and slowly I stand. The bathroom feels like about ten miles away. There is a mirror. I look like an abortion. My piss is a pale reeking rope. A beanbag chair, Trudy above me, headlights, titties, terror. But did I do fucking? I fight the urges to puke and cry and climb out the window and wander shoeless back to wherever I came from.
On the coffee table is more water, an assortment of tablets. Trudy says: “Take these. We got Tylenol here, a B-12, some vitamin C . . .”
More footsteps. I turn around. A strange girl smiling slyly. But wait, she’s no stranger. Her face comes back. Of course. The other Desert Storm girl.
“Hey you’re that guy,” she says. “I mean kid. Jeez.”
I say: “Yeah that’s me. The Kid.”
“Had some kinda bug up your ass about Desert Shield or whatever?”
I say: “Right.”
The girl has a three-foot water bong and starts doing hits.
She says: “Wake and bake is fun.”
In observance of good pot etiquette, she offers us the bong. Trudy smiles and declines and I am this close to spraying the entire world with vomit. Those pills I took are sitting in my empty stomach like three lead turds.
“So Vim,” Trudy says, “did you say you were hungry?”
“Vim?” from the other girl.
“Vim,” I say.
“Vim,” Trudy says.
“Now everybody,” I say.
I say: “Hungry? Uh yeah. Sure. I guess.”
“Well then it looks like we’re going out because all I have here is Yoo-hoo and Cocoa Puffs.”
And then we’re speeding along in her little red car with PC commands all over it. Keep Your Laws Off My Body. Love Your Mother. Visualize World Peace. Free Leonard Peltier. We take a left on Drake, go down to Stadium and turn into the Big Boy. Look at that fat plastic fucker, still holding up his prized burger with his idiot smile.
The all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet is kind of a miracle and kind of a nightmare. The place is packed with all the chainsmoking foreign students who stay in town after school lets out. Trudy has a large Coke and an orange juice and a water and a coffee. She eats scrambled eggs like cake crumbs, trapping little dry bits in her fork tines.
She says: “So what happened to you last night?”
I say: “In what sense do you mean that?”
“Well, you sleep with me and then when I wake up you’re gone?”
She sips from one of her four beverages.
“Yeah,” I say, “about that . . .”
“Yeah?”
My mouth hangs open but no words come. I am so fucking tired, so young and stupid and useless and sick. I feel like sex, or even just the idea of sex, crawled into me and died like a squirrel in an attic, and it’s now giving off foul death odors.
Trudy says: “Why’d you disappear?”
I smile and say: “Isn’t that what men do?”
She looks at me with pity or anger. “Yeah,” she says, “some of them.”
Then we eat in silence, making alternate trips to the buffet. No one comes by to clear our table and by the third or fourth trip we’re surrounded by plates with waffles and pancakes and all different meats, everything encrusted in syrup.
“By the way,” she says, “breakfast is on me.”
Which is good to hear because all my money is torn in shreds in the high grass on the side of the East Campus hill.