A Chemical Fire

A Chemical Fire

by Brian Martinez

Copyright © 2010 Brian Martinez

www.bloodstreamcity.com

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For Natalia,

my muse

Act One

Cabinet

Skin, Snow, Stillborns

A guy named Janet sells to me, pills mostly with a few things mixed in. Wrapping, he calls it. I don’t know the story behind Janet’s name because I won’t ask. It could be sensitive for him and it could make him angry, but I don’t care if his feelings get hurt, I care if I can get what I get. If there were a rulebook for the empty-eyed, the first line would read: Don’t piss off your dealer.

Janet keeps the air-conditioning going in his car year round, he says to keep things fresh but I’m not sure it’s the drugs he means. So all year, it’s the stale, frigid air. It’s fine in the summer but now it makes my muscles pull tight and shake, chopping my words to pieces.

He says, “So you’re getting it, right? Tell me you get it and you’re getting this. I don’t get you if you don’t get this.”

My teeth won’t relax, my skin is dead chicken. The cold doesn’t affect Janet though, neither does dealing in daylight: cars passing, kids running around in the snow when they should be running away. They should get far away because we’re not good in here. You can’t be good in a car with all this inside.

“I don’t know,” I say and crack my knuckles, the pop so loud it hurts. “It’s a jump. Something I told myself I’d never go to.” A kid on his lawn, bundled in layers and mittens, takes a plastic bat to his sister’s head. She goes down to the snow, he runs.

I look at the briefcase on the seat behind us, the brown case with cracks at the edges, splotched with old sticker-glue collecting hair and dust. It’s not where his stuff is- that’s in a fake panel cut into the floor. The case, Janet tells me, has a baby in it.

“I bought it off some rag woman,” he says. The baby: stillborn. The mother, scared worse than anything she hid in the old building and pushed and cried and pushed and slipped on sweat and fluids, pushed and did it, proud she’d needed no-one’s help. But then it was too quiet for someone’s birthday so she cried, enough for the two of them. She got up, wrapped him up nice and carried him around in a suitcase. In private places she talked to him and tucked him in, whispering into his shrinking eardrums. Two years later, she met Janet. She was crying when she told him the baby’s name was Casey. He laughed at her. He's still laughing.

“You get it, right? …Casey?”

This is the kind of conversation dealers manage to pull you into. It's never enough to engage in a straight-forward transaction. You have to get filthy in the process.

I breathe heavy, exhaustion thick on my eyes. “I’m just a man, Janet, a man enjoying the company of his pharmacist. You’re right, that’s some funny shit.”

Janet leans back, smelling the ass-end of a rolled cigarette. “Damn right, I thought you’d appreciate that. Knowing your money isn’t being pissed away, that it’s going somewhere.”

He lights his homemade cigarette while sucking in, the brown paper burning and the embers glowing. There's something inside lacing the nicotine. He breathes in chunks of smoke and studies me.

“That’s what I like about you. You crack me right up, man, you kill me. Look at you, thinking you’re still somebody, holding your nose up as you crawl into it. This from the guy who picked pills out of his own puke in my toilet.”

I sit up, ready to leave. He still has the pills though, and whatever he’s smoking is turning the volume up, filling the car with a bitter taste. There's nothing he loves more than this. Waving his power in my face. The only power he's ever had. This is why you don't give power to guys like Janet.

“So you say you won’t do the H? Of course you will. You’ve done everything short of it so you’re doing it.” As he talks his hands do something only he understands, the air shifting in his favor. “What’s the point of driving to the beach if you don’t get naked. Am I right? Fuck it, you’re doing the heroin. I’ve been training you for this.”

My mouth betrays me.

“You think that’s funny? Look at you, John. Know what I see? A man who's doing laps.” He looks me dead in the eyes, pupils serious and vibrating. “Like always I have to lay it out for you. Your pills are swimmers, understand, your veins are lanes. They’re tracks. Are they lying when they call them fucking track marks, John?”

I want to tell him what rehab was like. Telling your story to a group of people still lost in one of their own. Instead I say no.

“So listen to me, listen like skin. I’ve known you for two years, dealing you this and keeping you on this program, and you stuck to it the best you could. You did. But this is the next step right here. So I’m here and you’re here and the heroin is here, right, and so here we all are and this kind is one-eighty.”

I look away from him, at the neighborhood and the snow and the kids. At everything not him, and not me either. “So I can’t get the pills,” I say.

“Take off your sandals, John.”

I’m ready to get out of this car, one-eighty it is. I don’t know which I say- either one leads to the same place.

Let them See The Bullets: A Tragedy in Three Parts

1.

A year before I'm standing in a small store. The kind doesn’t matter, only that I’m here to buy something for my father. Three of us are here: me, the employee behind the counter, and a guy with a gun aimed at my chest. Then at the employee, then my chest, back to the kid, chest, kid.

“I’m not fucking around,” the guy says through his mask, but it’s the gun we’re listening to. The kid squints at it, his big cheeks red and pulled in. I lock up and keep to myself. No fast moves, no eye contact. I don't want him to think I can identify him to the police later. I want the additional jail time to outweigh the payoff of killing me. In short, I don't want to be worth the bullet.

Even the guy holding the gun, when he looks down it makes him shaky. I can picture him as a kid- playing with a plastic gun, unaware that twenty or thirty years later it'll be replaced by a metal one and he'll be cast as the robber, not the cop. Makes you wonder what that kid would think of this adult. What all kid versions would think of all adult versions.

The guy orders the kid around, pushing him to open the register. He says, “C’mon, big boy, I’ll shoot those Tootsie Roll fingers off if they don’t move faster. Let's see you work up a sweat.” It's been like this the whole time, with the fat jokes. The kid's starting to get annoyed.

“That’s everything,” he says, stuffing the money into a shopping bag. “Do you want a bag for your little gun, too? I don’t think we have one small enough." The guy with the gun asks him to repeat that, stepping closer. Feeling good, the kid says, "Don't worry, I'm not talking about your tiny dick."

I see the flash, hear the sound, see the hit. I watch blood hit the wall and I flinch, my chest booming as he turns the gun to me. He pulls the trigger again and only a click comes out. So here I am, standing a few feet from a man whose gun is jammed, leaving him with only fists. The same as me.

But my eyes stay on the gun. It’s a revolver, jammed, sure, but I can see the bullets between the spaces. Seeing them there, knowing they’re real and shiny and can come alive at any moment and explode into my intestines, it does something to my legs.

Then the guy grabs the bag and walks out of the store, money in hand, and I let him.

2.

The drive home feels gorgeous. I’m alive, not bleeding, not hurt and with music turned up loud, singing along with the wind in the windows, heading home to a wife who, having gotten my call, pulls me up the stairs, kisses me hard, leads me to the bed and takes off our clothes. She tells me I’m not allowed to leave her ever, ever, eyes wet when I promise her, so beautiful. Gala. My wife. Her shoulder skin sweet like fruit, her stomach soft against my palms, she pushes me down and puts her warm legs to mine, her head forward and her hair wrapping my neck.

In the morning, running late from Gala, I kiss her and follow the directions to the precinct to finish giving my statement. It takes me a few minutes to see the dark-grey building set above the shrubs but I find it, park across the street and run over.

3.

I wake up three days later with my wife on the right side of the bed and painkillers on the other, and I reach for my wife first.

Nuclear Medicine