I. Two
Dvaid stands staring at himself in the scuffed chrome of elevator doors. Craggy cheekbones strain at sallow skin, broken bristles of straw blonde hair hang in his eyes. Ratty, sleep-worn clothes are wrinkled and stiff: a far cry from the bolo-tied Eagle Scout David used to be. He flexes fists around a rumpled brown sack; red-raw, gnawed fingertips blanch with the effort. Brows arch—surprised at the sight. He closes his eyes to catch breath, but lifts lids impatiently, in time to see the elevator car arrive. Doors glide apart, his countenance splits in two. The ride down from five to one is IV drip slow.
Out on his own floor, he sprints in stocking feet over gum-stained shag. He unlocks and pivots into his apartment with one fluid motion, crosses the hardwoods on the balls of his feet, but Marie is already awake anyway: writhing in the apricot syrup of midmorning sunlight, hissing like Alka-Seltzer in ice water; glowing dust particles float, like daystars in the gravity of her space. Dvaid settles on the bed, presses his palm to her clammy, olive-complected brow and whispers her name.
Marie caterwauls—back arched and neck bent—kinks of long black hair an exploded ink firework on the crisp white pillowcase. She spews nonsense syllables; she wants something, but is powerless to say. Dvaid sets to his task and empties the sack: bent silver spoon, square of folded tinfoil, wrapped syringe and cotton batting. He reads the back of a grocery receipt Tod wrote out with instructions, sucks thirty CCs of water into the needle from a plastic cup on the nightstand.
Dvaid boils the dose exactly as told, sucks the solution through the threads of cotton. He kisses the eggshell skin of her collarbone as he cinches her arm with a shoelace. When he finds a vein and depresses the plunger, the change is immediate. Marie’s pupils shrink to pinpricks—the wide brown of each iris is rich, loamy earth under water. Tears bead in clumped lashes and Marie sighs like a punctured tire. Her muscles loosen, limbs lay prone on the bed. She slurs a word that might be gracias or perhaps just grass—brain’s speech center aphasic: cordwood chewed by worms—and slides into sleep.
Dvaid feels his relief, her relief, deep in his chest, as if her pain had been trapped steam now vented. He understands why every poet takes for granted that the heart is the seat of the soul. Dvaid’s heart is a trapeze artist and the crosshatched fibers of his love for Marie form the net into which it drops when concerned or careless, every time. He leans in close and presses his lips to hers. He whispers to her: “Marie.” She snores softly. His slowing heart sways suspended in his chest: a deadweight, ballast.
Oxycontin, Percocet, codeine: Dvaid also understands these. What’s prescribed, what the pharmacy peddles, is a cool bath for skin seared by napalm. Like rubbing aloe on a gunshot buttock. Dvaid has learned the truth: only heroin ameliorates the agony of cancer. There are clinics for this in other countries, but not his, not Marie’s. The oncologist promised Marie her death in six months. “Metastatic squamous cell lung cancer?” she said, Marie. “Qué trata influenza? Qué trata dropsy? If it’s terminal, they could at least call it a beautiful name.” A reasonably healthy sixth month stretched into a sick seventh, Marie eked out an exhausted eighth during which her humor finally died. The ninth month turned her into this: a wretched half-shade wracked with pain. The nerd in David (the part she most adored) sees his stricken love as Tolkien’s Gollum, but that only makes him keener to help.
What Dvaid got from his neighbor on five was a sample. A small time junkie, Tod came through—called a Toronto dope fiend named Hrbek who can always find volume. When chemotherapy can’t cure and radiation would be empty ritual, what’s left is twined hands and a vigil. What’s left is to soothe. They had no insurance, Dvaid lost his job to her increasing neediness. He sold clothing, sold blood, sold sperm, spent his food money and still he can’t comfort her.
He presses his ear to her chest and checks for breath; he traces the topography of her throat with his fingers. He kisses each breast and steps away toward the door. I can do this, he thinks, I have to. David was never exceptional; Dvaid makes exceptions for love.
