KATHARSIS (Chapter Twenty-Four)

        When the end seems inevitable it becomes so from the seeming. If I could have stayed in the dream I would have, but as soon as I thought of it ending I began to rise toward the surface, and I knew there was no going back once reality’s warm, decrepit air had touched my face. I breathed it in and it tasted like an old memory, as if I hadn’t breathed this sort of air in years. The sweat clinging to my forehead and the right side of my nose felt like it belonged to someone else. I was swimming now in hot, blinking delirium instead of sleep, my vision blurred like the humid air had fogged-up my eyes, eyes were now pointed absently at the ceiling’s broken crown molding, a crooked and dangling piece of white-painted wood, which I didn't think I'd ever seen before.

        I rubbed the fog and the tinted remains of the dream into my eyelids then blinked around at the unfamiliar room. A useless AC unit groaning intermittently on my left, bemoaning its own exhaustion; the air saturated by two stretched pyramids of dim, yellowish light coming in from the windows, and when I coughed feebly into my hand I could somehow taste that color on my tongue. It tasted how I imagine mercury might taste. I wanted to remember how I got here, but nothing came to me. I propped myself up onto my elbows. My arms felt strangely weak, as if they hadn’t been used in days. The bed beneath me was a far cry from my Tempur-Pedic at home. This was just a deflated and sweat-damp air-mattress on the floor, angled acutely, and almost psychotically, toward nothing in particular, just bits of trash on the tufted beige rug, ragged like the pelt of a Clifford-sized street dog. The spectrum of litter was appallingly eclectic: tissue wads, a soda can, receipts, mildewed socks and t-shirts, several fast food and delivery bags, two shriveled black banana peels, at least five clear-plastic cups (two of which had some shit-green mold in them swarming with fruit flies), ketchup-smeared paper plates, empty ziplock bags, loose nickels and pennies, dozens of empty orange pill bottles, and a red dildo-looking thing that, wait, yes, yep, that’s definitely a dildo.

        I couldn’t focus my thoughts or memories for longer than a moment at a time, but the last thing I remembered I had been at a small party with my girlfriend Sarah, both of us still tripping on the bag of mushrooms we’d eaten in the afternoon by the river, and we got into an uncharacteristically tense argument on the patio. I was out there by myself, sitting in silence on a plastic chair and smoking a spliff, when Sarah slipped out through the sliding glass doors with a red cup in her hand, permitting obnoxious rap music to flood out of the house into the quiet space until she slid the glass shut behind her. She walked over wearing a coy smile, a smile that I knew had come from inside the party and not from any pleasure my presence might inspire. I asked her about the smile, and she said, “Well, I asked Isabel if I could sleep over at her house, and David was standing right there and he said, ‘You can always sleep at my place.’” She laughed at the anecdote and looked at me expectantly. I said he wanted to punch David in the face. Sarah protested, of course, and I accusingly asked her why she cared so much one way or the other. From there the film reel of my memory came to a tattered edge. There was an empty chasm between that memory and the present.

        The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that the argument had escalated and I had gone home with another girl out of spite. Whoever this girl was, she was quite clearly a disgusting slob, probably a drug addict, and she was nowhere to be found. Maybe she was in the bathroom or something and would be returning shortly. I wanted to leave before she returned. She was undoubtedly hideous, and if I could avoid seeing her and confirming this suspicion it would be almost like nothing had happened between us. I sat up, positioning myself in the center of the mattress to avoid touching any of the surrounding filth, my repulsion eclipsed by the greater discomfort of wondering where Sarah might be waking up at this same moment. It certainly wasn’t a place like this, and above all I hoped she wasn’t waking up in David’s bedroom.

        Sarah had slept at David’s house once before, a month earlier, while I was away at college. The way she told it, she had blacked out at the bar (on Katharax and drinking heavily because she was so sad whenever I was gone), and she had returned to consciousness with David grunting and flopping on top of her. Supposedly she had cried afterward and slept on the couch in shame, but the provocative joke at last night’s party and her amused response suggested she might have been happy to sleep with David, and perhaps the sad details of her story were only added to deflect blame and to make me sympathize with her.

        I had now committed the same infidelity, it seemed, but as I clamped my nose with my fingers and continued surveying the room I realized I was more ashamed of the girl I’d cheated with than the betrayal itself. I actually felt quite vindicated in my own hypocrisy. It evened the score and, for all he knew, Sarah might be in David’s bed right now, fucking in a room that probably smelled more of Febreze and cannabis than shit and mold.

        The moaning AC unit blew stale air at me as I rose, wobbly-legged from the mattress to search for my clothes and my phone. The ache in my head rolled and grew with the motion, and I was startled by how weak and shrunken I felt. It was as if some parasite had sucked the vitality from me as I slept. I spotted the phone on top of the wooden dresser next to my wallet and the keys to the Jetta. My khaki shorts and green collared shirt were nowhere in sight, but near the door there was a pair of jeans that looked like a man’s and near the mattress there was a white and green NEWMAN FOOTBALL t-shirt identical to one I owned. Perhaps this was not a girl’s place after all. Maybe a fellow Newman alumnus had let me sleep over, but I couldn’t think of any classmates or acquaintances with such low standards of cleanliness. I was anxious to see if there were any answers in the phone’s text messages, and I knew that my parents were probably worrying themselves into a fury that I had slept out without letting them know, so I stepped off the mattress onto the ragged carpet and maneuvered my way toward the stout, wooden dresser, staggering between piles of trash and over pill bottles and the bodies of little dead insects.

        I took my phone off of the dresser and opened up the home screen, expecting to see several banners signaling missed text messages and calls. There weren’t any. I opened up the text messages folder and the entire thing was empty. I opened up my recent calls. They had been wiped too, but it made perfect sense because I had probably texted and called the girl that lived in this house, and if so I would have deleted the evidence to keep Sarah from finding it. In my drunken stupidity, I had evidently deleted all the messages and all the calls, instead of just the incriminating ones.

        Still standing in front of the dresser in nothing but plaid boxers, I typed out a text message to my mother that read: Hey sorry for not calling or texting you sooner to let you know I was sleeping out. I’ll be heading home shortly. I sent the message then typed another one out, this time addressed to Sarah: What the hell happened last night?

        I waited, staring at the phone screen.

        Two minutes later, neither Sarah nor my mother had responded. I wanted to call Sarah, but I didn’t want to be in this house when I talked to her. It would be safer to call when I got home. I turned back toward the mess on the carpet and set about looking for my shirt, shorts, and shoes. I figured the shirt and shorts would be near the bed, because I would have taken them off while laying down with the strumpet that lived in this place. I scampered to the mattress, the only place in the room visibly clear of trash and dead insects, and I in the center, turning in slow circles as I examined the floor. I saw the lime-ish green of my collared shirt poking out of a pile of clothes in the corner of the room closest to where I had laid my head. There were ruffled khaki shorts in the same pile with a black leather belt still running through the loops. The absence of girl clothes was becoming more and more overt and alarming, and I had to suppress the loathsome possibility that I had been taken advantage of by a guy. In any case, my asshole wasn’t sore and I had found my clothes. I stepped off the mattress and bent over the pile of clothing. When I pulled the green shirt from the center, an orange plastic script bottle rolled silently onto the carpet. The shirt was damp, wrinkled, and smelled strongly of mildew, and before putting it on I crouched down to inspect the pill bottle. Most likely it had been used as a weed container by some thoughtful drug dealer, but if it turned out to be a legitimate prescription, the name on the outside might finally reveal who lived in this hellish apartment.

        I turned the bottle in my hand and squinted at the label, glossing it over once, then again because I was sure that I had misread the name. The label read:

        CVS Pharmacy
        Rx#: 4307881-36204
        THEODORE GREENBAUM
        KATHARAX
        50 100-MG TABLETS
        TAKE ONE TABLET BY MOUTH BEFORE BEDTIME

        After reading it top to bottom three more times I just stood there, staring at it, holding the smelly collared shirt and considering the possibility that I was still dreaming or that this was all part of some elaborate prank. There were several other pill bottles scattered randomly across the floor, and I knew without having to look at them that they would all say the same thing. My eyes fell now upon the NEWMAN FOOTBALL shirt near the door, and I knew that if I checked inside the collar I would find the word GREENBAUM Sharpied on the tag in my mother’s handwriting. The other clothes, which had blended inoffensively into the texture of disarray, now seemed to glow like beacons, each color announcing their significance unequivocally: yes, hello, this is me. This is your goddamn purple shirt.

TO BE CONTINUED