Dosing//Alicia Wright
Certain cities have certain smells, and my Days Inn pillow belches a rancid smog into the room thicker than the swampy summer night outside the window. The air conditioner refused to kick on and last night’s heat was oppressive, smothering. I’m simmering in the stench of piss and every body that has lain here before mine. The continental breakfast is breakfast in name only; I eat the soft fruit and share a frown with the teenager at the front desk. An hour in Rust Belt traffic is an hour too long and the streets are a disappointment but I can’t bring myself to put up a fight.
I remember home: she’s back from work and I’m on the fire escape, afraid of myself. In the kitchen she boils water on a hot plate because the gas company demands money she doesn’t have to give.
We sit outside a church. I imagine its walls beige and hung with rumors of Jesus. I wonder about the word anonymous. The people inside have been sober for months or weeks or days or they spent last night like I did, thinking too hard about the dim bar on the corner, about tallboys of Icehouse and gluey nacho cheese. I watch her thin wrists, veins coursing and lively on the backs of her hands as she worries her ragged cuticles.
**
Home is 14 hours away from the stew of my corner room at the peeling Days Inn. A week ago, in the parking lot of the diner out front, a man shot another man over a small bag of unidentified something. His aim was unsteady and the police didn’t show up until he’d tucked the bag and the gun back into his jacket and disappeared. I wasn’t awake to see it but the story is on the lips of the waitress who puts a cup of coffee I didn’t order on the table in front of me. It’s the most exciting thing she’s seen in weeks.
She addresses me as yinz. I’ve been here too long.
I pull a napkin to pieces, wad the pieces into a ball. I order a plate of scrambled eggs and not the special; this makes her frown, but the caverns, the pits of my stomach struggle against the thought of steak and toast and diced potatoes charred on the flat top. I am a husk.
She brings the eggs and a pot to refill the mug I have not once lifted to my mouth.
“Did you hear...?” She starts, but I grimace and the question dies on her tongue. She doesn’t remember that she’s told me already. She slides into the booth across from me, her ankle to my ankle below the table.
“The guy with a gun?”
She nods.
“A drug thing?”
She nods again.
“I heard,” I say. I don’t want to hear more about the drug thing. She thinks the drug thing is funny. I feel a pinch at the base of my spine. The tips of my shoulders are on fire.
She has seen me in the mornings, khakis and crisp shirts, hair clean and meticulously parted, daypack wedged between my hip and the wall. She stayed curious for a few days before she asked and when I told her, she decided she knew me. She does not know me.
She is not bad in the same way I’m not good. Her uniform is too tight in the wrong places and the costume I wear hangs on me like a heavy second skin. I could tell her this. I’ve thought about telling her this.
Her nails are smooth crescent moons painted antacid pink.
**
Her name, I find out is Mary. It doesn’t feel right, knocks clumsily against my teeth. In the morning when the heat comes to bury us, I realize I’m no longer a yinz. It’s almost worth it.
When I get out of the shower, she has opened the paperback a past tenant left behind in the nightstand drawer. The story is bad but I’ve decided to keep it within reach, the Polaroid I’ve carried in my wallet for years tucked like a talisman safely inside. Mary has found it.
“Who’s this?”
I watch my eyes in the mirror as I button my shirt and try to rearrange my face into something that won’t contradict what I’m about to say.
“No one.”
“She’s pretty.”
In the photo she is backlit by the window in the living room. There’s no other light burning in the apartment, so whether or not she’s pretty is anyone’s guess. I take the book and close it.
“I’m going for a walk,” I say, and when I leave I take both keys.
**
I sit in one final waiting room. Across from me a child rolls a toy car across his father’s thigh, then up his arm to park in his elbow. The television plays the mid-morning news: a square-jawed congressman is glaring at North Korea and a celebrity has given their beautiful sad child a name that will doom them to the barest corners of every future playground. By the time I’m led to the office, a football player has signed a contract. I can’t fathom so many zeroes.
“This one,” I tell the doctor when she’s seated behind her massive desk, “is the new favorite.”
“What’s wrong with the old favorite?”
She looks much younger than the others. Too young to be responsible for anything.
I’ve memorized the list: “Blood monitoring. Toxicity. The new one doesn’t touch the kidneys.”
I’ve gotten better at lying. My voice doesn’t quiver anymore.
“But?”
She’s prettier than Mary. I don’t want to talk about side effects.
“The rash could kill you.”
**
On the last day, I try to shake the smell of the city and its hotel from my clothes. I spray my luggage with Febreze and dress in jeans and a t-shirt bearing the name of a college that refused to grant my degree. I pass the keys to the teenager at the front desk, buy a candy bar at the gas station and eat it in two bites at the pump while the car fills. It groans beneath the weight of a full tank, weary already of its destination.
I stare at my reflection in the visor mirror, trace the lines around my eyes with a fingertip. Forehead, cheeks, freckled nose. Long drives with no sunscreen and the windows down. I’m coming home ruined again.
She’ll be glad this time to not pull me in pieces through the door.
As I wait for her to let me in, men from the restaurant she lives above carry boxes through the kitchen door. They stomp them flat for the dumpster before seeing me, but when they do they motion me toward them, one offering a cigarette, the other a lighter. I take them in the appropriate order and when she opens the door, I’m sitting on a turned-over milk crate with two men who have watched her put me in the backseat of a taxi before passing the driver a handful of cash and directions elsewhere. I don’t know their names but they know how this story ends.
“Do you want me or not?” She calls.
Before I get the chance to put out the cigarette, one of the men takes it from between my fingers and tucks it into the corner of his mouth for safekeeping while he finishes his own.
She stands backlit by the living room window, following my eyes around the kitchen. The hot plate is gone and a pot of spaghetti boils loudly on the stove.
I shouldn’t show up unannounced like this. She’s told me as much. She has said it does things to her, but she always opens the door.
“You didn’t bring anything?” She asked.
My bags are in Virginia somewhere. I don’t know the city but I remember the rest stop and the sign declaring it the last before the road wound itself up and into the silent mountains. I’d folded the khakis and shirt neatly onto the edge of the sink for someone who might wear them honestly and emptied my backpack and case into a trashcan. There was nothing else to bring.
She offers dinner and I take it, hoping my presence at her table will discourage whoever the meal was meant for. The bottle of wine on the counter tells me she’d planned to spend her evening with someone willing to meet her gaze.
When she leaves to answer the door, I’ve finished eating so I go to the window above the sink. The men are on their milk crates again and she’s stepped outside in her bare feet to talk to someone who has shown up in a car not grimy from travel. From the top of their head, I know they don’t need to keep track of days as vigilantly as I’m supposed to.
One of the men glances up at me. I can read his expression clearly, even from the second floor.
I pass them as I leave the apartment, noting as I do that she barely turns her head. Once out of town I tell myself stories about bridges, about the washouts beneath them and the cars abandoned there, footprints sunk into the mud on the way to the water. When the suburbs have dimmed behind me, I find a ramshackle phone booth next to a ramshackle bus stop. There is no dial tone, but some miracle has left the Yellow Pages attached. I flip through it aimlessly. None of the churches sound innocent: End Time Harvest, Mouth of God. I imagine myself in flames.
I close the book. It dangles near my head from its chain when I sit down on the curb. The night is gauzy and I don’t notice the clerk from the convenience store across the street until he’s picked his way through the field of potholes between us and offered me a bottle.
The lid is a twist-off, which is either good or bad. Depending. I take it.
It hurts less than I thought it would. It’s nothing like falling off a wagon.
**
“You told me to get an honest job.”
It’s after midnight when she answers the phone, and I’m on the ground by the river, mud soaking through the seat of my jeans. There’s too much breathing in the room where she is.
“Lying about drugs is the opposite of honest.”
I’m quiet. She’s quiet.
“I guess you know that, though.”
I roll a bottle cap across my knuckles.
“It was money,” I say. “You said we needed money.”
There is murmuring on the other end of the line, the sound of a door closing. She’s in the bathroom, running the faucet to drown out her side of our conversation. I can picture her knees, peeking from beneath the hem of her long t-shirt.
“Why are you back?”
I tell her about Mary, about the way her uniform never fit quite right. I tell her about the hotel, about the diner, the shooting in the parking lot. I tell her everything I think will keep her on the line, but I don’t know how to apologize.
The sound of water dissipates. There’s nothing to hide tonight.
**
She doesn’t let me find her again. When I get out of the car, the men are on their milk crates but they don’t offer cigarettes or a lighter. They watch as I knock, as I wait, as I turn to leave.
At the store I ignore the flyers tacked on the bulletin board by the register. Neon cardstock advertising more church basements. The electric hum of the beer cave wins out.
God grant me the serenity.
Alicia Wright is from Appalachia and received an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Her poetry has appeared in Same Faces Collective, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Kestrel, The Cape Rock, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere.