A Dangerous Game (16 page)

The figure reached out two impossibly long arms, and Rufus turned, his eyes wide with terror.

Wren screamed—

—and awakened himself, the cry still fresh on his lips, a garbled shriek that perhaps under different circumstances might have made him laugh.

The studio was flooded with full daylight, and Wren squinted against the blaze of the sun’s rays on his face, despite the chill of air-conditioning. He sat up and rubbed his eyes, looking around, wondering once more how he had gotten here, how his life had changed so quickly.

As his heart rate returned to normal, he noticed Rufus’s duffel on the floor. He pictured Rufus’s laptop inside.

And he was tempted once again.

Was there something more his story would tell him? Wren swallowed, trying hard to summon up some spit, and glanced over his shoulder at the door. It had to be close to noon now; what if Rufus walked in on him?

What if he didn’t?

Wren bit his lip, opened the duffel, and brought out the laptop again.

March 12

The first thing I think of when I wake up is not the letter and its creepy message but my penis. It hurts. I throw off the comforter and sheet and look down. Where the little blisters had been are now angry deep red bumps, almost like scabs but not crusty.

Shit. This will entail a trip to the doctor, and lucky me! No insurance.

I’m sure it’s herpes. What a wonderful life. I’ve lost my job. I don’t know how I’ll pay the rent next month, and now I have herpes.

How could I get herpes? That’s a good one. How could I not get herpes?

So here I sit, watching
The Golden Girls
on Lifetime (I should probably cancel the cable), remembering when it was funny to think that I identified with Blanche, the “human mattress,” as her elderly roommate Sophia referred to her.

Oh yeah, promiscuity was a real scream.

Which makes me think of the letter I got yesterday. How many guys have been “inside my house” lately?

Lots. Maybe one of them was just trying to be funny, in a sick sort of way, especially if he was one of the few I threw back after seeing how small he was.

Just as the show ends, the doorbell downstairs rings. A visitor? For me?

Why, I wasn’t expecting anyone.

I pull a T-shirt over my head and hurry downstairs. There’s no one there. Maybe it was someone for Gabe, someone who pushed the wrong doorbell. With only two to buzz and names under each, you’d think people wouldn’t get confused, but they do.

I open the door to look up and down the street. Perhaps the kids in the neighborhood still find this kind of joke funny.

The street’s pretty deserted. The young married guy across the street is finally taking his Christmas lights down. Other than that, no one’s around.

They all have jobs, Rufus. Everyone but you is at work.

Just as I’m about to close the door, I notice the small brown-paper-wrapped parcel at my feet.

Ah, a personal delivery. The package has only the word “Rufus” written on it in the same black block letters that my previous missive had.

I pick up the package and suddenly have a queasy feeling of dread. Something, over the pounding of my heart, is trying to tell me not to open it.

Suddenly an inspiration. I turn and knock on Gabe’s door. At least I won’t have to open it alone. I knock once, twice, three times, but there’s no answer. Even Gabe, who lives on a trust fund and doesn’t have to worry about going to work, is gone.

The package is small, lightweight. I take it upstairs with me, set it on the coffee table, and stare at it.

What are you afraid of, Rufus? You think someone’s sent you a bomb? Yeah, right.

Look, I’m a good-looking guy, and I have my share of admirers. This package is probably a little gift, a way some shy guy thinks he’s going to get in my good graces, or my pants… again.

What the hell. I rip the paper off to reveal a small white cardboard box, which opens from the top. I lift the lid slowly, leaning back in case something should leap out at me, but all I see is tissue paper. I pull it off, and there at the bottom of everything is a small plastic bag with a white powder in it that looks so familiar it makes my heart race.

Who would send me cocaine? The shit is expensive. Why would they leave and not stay to enjoy it with me? Who cares? Better not to have to share it. My spirits rise and dance in the air. What a wonderful surprise.

And then a chill.

What if it’s not cocaine? Or what if it’s cocaine mixed with something else? Anthrax? Something poisonous. (As if cocaine isn’t a poison itself, I think, remembering how sick it can make me feel after I do one, or two, or three… too many lines. Thinking of how depressed and tired I feel after a night’s bingeing.)

I open the little baggie, bring it up to my nose. It sure smells like cocaine, and if there’s one thing I know the smell of, it’s coke. But the thought that there could be something lethal mixed in with it continues to plague me.

I really should just flush this shit down the toilet. I don’t know where it came from, and to snort it up my nose could have serious, even fatal, consequences. Why someone would want to kill me, though, is a mystery. I may be weak and selfish (and when did that all start? I didn’t used to be that way. I wonder when it could have started… maybe when I started using? Gosh, what a revelation!), but I’m essentially a good person. I wouldn’t hurt anyone on purpose. Except myself.

Is self-destruction cruelty?

But getting back to the matter at hand…. Oh shit, I want the stuff so bad it’s making my mouth water. It’s like a cloud enveloping my brain and shutting out reason, making it disappear beneath the fog of my desire. Or should I say addiction?

No, I’m not that far gone yet.

It would be so stupid to do it.

But I could just do a couple of lines and wait for a little while, see if I have any ill effects. I mean, I know what coke would do to me (oh yeah), and if it felt any different, I could just flush the rest.

A couple of lines wouldn’t be enough to hurt me. I mean, I know that there’s at least some cocaine in there. I know that smell, and there’s nothing like it.

I begin assembling the tools of my trade: the dollar bill, the straw, the razor blade, the ballpoint pen. A pack of Marlboro Lights.

March 13

Well, as the song goes, I’m still here. The stuff was pretty good. Pretty bad… now that it’s 9:00 a.m. and I haven’t slept, haven’t put anything in the way of sustenance in my body but six Michelob Genuine Drafts since breakfast yesterday.

Oh, it was quite a party. I stare dully at the TV screen, thinking.

Is this how things will be from now on?

Am I an addict?

Where will it end?

Is this the point where I have to admit to myself that I can’t control it?

Six guys over last night. A record. What bugs, viruses, and diseases are beginning to bloom inside me right now? Now as I sit here staring at a cartoon on the Cartoon Network (I have to get that cable canceled), I wonder how I’m ever supposed to find another job at this rate. And if I did, how could I possibly keep it? I mean, this cocaine use has gone beyond the occasional Friday night party.

Somewhere I have the number for a Chicago chapter of Cocaine Anonymous. But I don’t know if I’m ready to deal with that. I don’t know if such a group can really help me.

Excuse?

But I have to do something.

How did I get here? How did I, a guy who got good—no, make that great—grades all through high school and college, end up here? This wasn’t supposed to happen. I mean, I was the kind of guy the partiers in my dorms in college referred to as a lightweight, because I drank three beers and I was done for. Because I would turn down the bong or the joint when it was passed around with a sheepish smile. Because I didn’t even know anyone who used cocaine, let alone try it myself until relatively late in life.

A boyfriend brought coke into my life. Funny how I haven’t spoken to him in months, yet his legacy lingers on… in the dusting of white powder on my coffee table, in the thick mucus now clogging my sinuses, in the teeth-grinding aftermath of a binge. Edward didn’t leave me with much: a gray-and-black lamb’s wool muffler and an addiction to cocaine. Yes, an addiction. I can’t pretend any differently… not now… not ever again.

It had started so simply. He had a little coke in his apartment… what was it? Our third or fourth date. We were having sex, and he suggested we do a little. And looking back, a little was all there was… maybe two or three lines for each of us. What would be just a little kick start for me now. But then, God, did it make me feel good! It made the sex wonderful, long lasting, delicious, really. And afterward, we sat up talking, and it seemed my inhibitions about discussing anything were gone. I was witty and well-spoken. I smoked one of Edward’s cigarettes, then two. What I had previously found disgusting now seemed so satisfying.

But even then I didn’t really think about wanting more. It had just been an isolated incident. A little harmless fun. And wasn’t it time I stop being such an overachiever and start to have a little fun? To experiment?

It wasn’t until two or three weeks later that Edward casually suggested we buy some together. He knew a guy who would deliver it right to his apartment. Little did I know that the number for that guy would one day become branded on my brain, incapable of being forgotten.

And that’s how it started. Back then, I still don’t know how well acquainted with coke Edward was, because we lasted only a month, maybe six weeks, longer. But that first weekend turned into a second, a second into a third, and so on until we were doing it every weekend. Until what I looked forward to on Friday nights was not so much seeing Edward as calling the number from which would grow cocaine.

After things ended (badly… but that’s irrelevant), I stoked up the courage to call Edward, even though we said good-bye under circumstances that weren’t conducive to casual phone conversation. But see, it was always Edward who called Sam. I never knew the number.

And I had to have it.

Edward didn’t mind giving me the number. Knowing him, he was probably glad to, because he probably wanted to see me as addicted as he was. Edward was very handsome, you see, but under that gorgeous blond facade lurked a monster, something not pretty at all. Just a selfish thing. Edward wore blinders. He didn’t really know how to relate to people beyond satisfying his own needs. He could be absolutely charming, but I learned fast that the charm was nothing more than a means to an end.

Edward was, in the lingo, a sociopath.

Can you say that, class? Sociopath.

Never mind. I didn’t get any sexually transmitted diseases, or even a cold, from Edward. But he did infect me, and his giving me the number for Sam was the final entree for the disease of addiction.

Or was it? Sure, there were some lonely nights when I called Sam, knowing I couldn’t afford it, knowing I needed to get up for work the next morning. It’s funny how I knew cocaine’s awful side effects right from the beginning. But what really put the finishing touch on things was that my next “involvement” was with someone who… surprise!… loved cocaine as much as I did. I think we went out twice before we started doing coke together. And then, forget going out to dinner, or a play, or a movie. No, we stayed in and stayed up all night, watching porn, snorting coke, and masturbating. Neither of us was much interested in sex with each other once coke got involved. Curious, because we started using the phone sex line to have guys over, and we would have three-ways.

It all seems so sick now. But by that time I was through with Kevin. (I couldn’t even tell you why that one ended; we just stopped talking. I assume Kevin is probably in the same boat I am now. Well, I hope not.) What I didn’t realize was that my relationship with Kevin showed graphically how I was beginning to cut myself off from human contact. I was beginning to state my preference for blow over getting blown. Ha-ha. The truth, though, and I think anyone who’s been in a serious relationship with cocaine will tell you the same, is that we cokeheads eventually come to care less about human contact. Nothing can replace the allure of our new best friend.

So this is where it stands. Will I get help? Or will this journal become like some recording, stuck on endless loop, playing the same notes over and over?

March 14

An entire day has passed without coke. The cycle is funny. That one day of rest makes all the difference in the world. It puts me almost back to square one. I say almost because my nose is still runny and I have a throbbing headache, which I know is from the clogged sinuses.

And the craving, like a little quiet mouse, is creeping back. The craving thoughts are so primitive they use pictures rather than words to induce the allure, the need, the want… whatever you want to call it. Primitive because it comes to me only in the occasional image, not in words, not in a goal. I see myself leaning over with the straw in my hand. I see myself emptying the ground-up coke on the coffee table. I see myself sitting back on the couch, fortified by three fat white lines, lighting a cigarette and turning my attention to the porno on the TV screen.

These little images are interspersed with my thoughts as a sensible person. The one who’s still there, but I wonder how long it will be before he too packs his bags and takes his leave.