KATHARSIS (Chapter Eighteen)

        I stared at the line of Katharax for another few seconds, knowing full well I couldn't back-out but contemplating the decision all the same. Once I’d snorted this innocuous pile of white dust, I would lose any semblance of control I still held over the direction this evening might take. I would likely blackout, and I might find the world a very different place when, and if, I woke up.
        Perhaps the most bizarre thing about Katharax is that you don't just “blackout” in the conventional sense, you forget things retroactively too. A major KX blackout doesn’t just include the time you were high on the drug— it can include hours, days, and in extreme cases even weeks leading up to the actual event. For the user, though, the transition is seamless, so seamless it can feel like time travel, and that’s exactly how it felt for me when I did that line with Buddy. One moment I was looking at a sliver of myself behind the white powder on the mirror, imagining where and how I might wake up in the morning, and as this thought was still passing through my head I found that it was the morning. I was lying in my underwear on my deflated Aero bed, no blankets over me, soaked in sweat but feeling light and hollow as a balloon. All I could feel was the infinitesimally thin membrane dividing my inside from outside, and while I could feel the division, it seemed for several minutes that my consciousness wasn’t seated on either side of it. I was just floating around in the ether, detecting the feeling of humid air on my skin as if through a far-away telepathy, an astral projection that had settled, by unfortunate coincidence, on this pale and sweating pile of flesh.
        I was forced out of this strange purgatory by the shriek of the doorbell. It began with a single, shrill buzzing, but soon it was coming in rapid bursts, and with each sound I became more firmly couched in my own body, and I realized with amazement that it really was the next morning, that I really had leapt ahead in time. This realization and my return to my body were followed immediately by a wave of anxiety and a myriad of questions. What happened to Buddy? Is Bob okay? Did I do anything insane in my blacked out state? Who is at the door and why do they sound so frantic?
        I sat up dizzily and watched the roaches scattering from the movement. My eyes hurt from the light, dim as it was. I stood up, wobbled, then took my Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt off the floor and put it on. I looked at a pair of shorts a few feet away on the floor, but I didn’t bother to put them on because the buzzing had picked up again, building to such an insane pace that it seemed the ringer would prefer my lack of shorts over any further delay.
        I floated out of my door and down the hallway, scanning as I went for anything unusual or anything that might bring back a memory of the night before. There was nothing different about the hallway. The living room looked normal too, by its own low standards, except that the orange juice bottle was empty and the vodka bottle was gone. The gun was gone too. The doorbell had stopped ringing, and I hesitated at the door, wondering if I should open it at all. What if it was the police here to evict Buddy, and I was standing around hungover, no shorts on, with shards of a cocaine mirror behind me?
        The hell with it, I thought, and I pulled open the door. My eyes weren’t ready for the sunlight I’d let in. I recoiled from the glare then squinted into it, a small woman’s silhouette forming in the white stain on my retinas.
        “Oh thank God!” cried the shadow, and it threw up its arms. “Where is Buddy? Is he okay?”
        My eyes finally adjusted to the glare enough to recognize the woman I’d met two days earlier and whose name I still didn’t know. The bowl cut was unchanged, but everything else about her seemed older, frailer, and altogether exhausted. Her skin hung over her face and neck like a wrinkled piece of fabric, and there was a bleakness in her eyes that reminded me of Buddy’s in that first time I had met him, right here where we were standing now.
        Where was Buddy? I didn’t know, and she could tell from my glazed look that I didn’t.
        “I’m going to check on him,” she announced, and she walked past me into the house.
        “Buddy? Buddy!” she called, moving rapidly into the hallway. “Buddy, it’s momma!”
        I shuffled along behind her, passing my open door and considering how awful and frightening the place must look to a parent. The roaches were as bad as ever in the kitchen, running around with impunity on top of the mound of uncleaned dishes that sat piled in the sink. There was a hole in the wall from where Buddy’s thrown the toaster. She reached Buddy’s door and pounded on it with her fist.
        “Buddy, it’s momma, open up!”
        I stood behind her in the opening to the kitchen, still not knowing what to say, but growing more and more concerned. She kept hitting the door, but there was no response. She jiggled the handle, but it was locked.
        “Maybe he isn’t home,” I offered.
        “He’s home,” she said. “And I can hear his music playing in there.”
        She was right. Now as I inched closer, I began to hear the guitar chords of some classic rock song or folk song coming faintly through the wall.
        “Buddy open up!”
        She twisted the knob one last time, then she kicked the door in frustration.
        “I’m going to try the other door,” she said. “You stay here and keep calling him.”
        There was a second door to Buddy’s room. It led to a small porch overlooking the back lot, and it had a staircase leading down to the corner where Buddy always parked his truck. He never seemed to use that door, but there was a chance it might be unlocked. As Buddy’s mother raced back through the kitchen and down the hallway, I took a jam-covered butter knife from the kitchen counter to try and unlock the door. I’d seen Buddy do it one time when he’d drunkenly locked himself out, and if he could do it drunk then surely I could do it now. The door was old and stood loose in its beaten frame, which was so damaged that there was a significant gap where the deadbolt would slide in. If I could get the knife in there at the proper angle, then I could force the tongue of the deadbolt out of the way just long enough to pull the door open.
        As I started jamming the knife in there I heard Buddy’s mother starting to knock and yell from the other door.
        “Buddy! Buddy, it’s momma! Please answer me!”
        I could tell from her voice she was starting to weep. Oddly enough, I began to think of Schrodinger’s Cat, the quantum mechanical notion that, prior to direct observation, an ordinary object could be held in a superposition of contradictory states. On the other side of that door, Buddy was either alive or dead. He wasn’t waiting for us to find him to collapse his wave-function and become one thing or another. He was either alive or dead, and hoping one way or the other wouldn’t change a thing, but I prayed to God anyway: Please don’t let him be dead. Please don’t let him be dead.
        Suddenly, the end of the knife slid past the tongue of the dead bolt. The door came swinging toward me, and since I’d been using the resistance to balance myself I went falling back onto the floor. The music was clearer now, a Neil Young song I didn’t recognize, a lazy melody going, I think I’ll pack it in and…. buy a pick-up… take you down to L.A… Three or four roaches came spilling out along with the sound, and I heard Buddy’s mom’s muffled voice yelling, “What was that? Buddy? Is Buddy alright?”

        It was half an hour before the ambulance arrived. Not that there was any point in them coming— the cop I spoke to said it looked like Buddy’d been dead for at least ten hours, judging by the discoloration. As awful as it had been to find him— and it had certainly been awful— the worst part had undoubtedly been the pointless waiting for the ambulance, as if they could just cart off his body and everything would be made right again. The state of the room was appalling— the carpet wasn’t visible anywhere from all the delivery and fast food trash, plates, cups, clothes piles, and everything else (an open suitcase in front of the bed had two dildos, a vibrator, and a strap-on). The roaches were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them. It was like the room itself was a petri dish and the roaches were some bacterial culture that was boiling up out of it. Buddy’s bed was like an island in the middle of all that mess, the only place the roaches wouldn’t go, maybe out of respect for their great benefactor, the man who had planted the seeds of their civilization, and now lay dead and white and open-eyed, staring at the fan that was squealing and shaking on the ceiling, as if it were trying to free itself and escape. I stood around in the middle of that hell hole as Buddy’s mother threw herself over her son’s pale and naked body, sobbing, weeping, screaming at him, screaming at God, screaming at herself, screaming at me, asking why, why, why, over and over, as if the question even had an answer. I stood around until the police told me to leave, then I went back into my room and sat in the swivel chair, noting how the mess in my room might have looked like the early stages of the mess in the room I’d just left. I tried to weep, but I couldn’t. So instead I just sat there, staring, without a thought in my head.

TO BE CONTINUED