Firebird (The Firebird Trilogy #1) (22 page)

***

Alex flicked through his extensive contact list. The advantage of having so many acquaintances eager to get into a young millionaire’s good graces was the ability to obtain whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. He pressed the Call button beside an entry for a bouncer who worked at a local strip club. Not Teasers—fuck that place—but the upscale club downtown with friendly, hot girls who knew how to dance.

Alcohol had been dragging him further into his abyss. Time for a stronger medicine now he had stopped giving a fuck. It wasn’t as if Stephanie would find out or care if she did. She was too smart, had too much going for her, to spare her disaster of an ex-boyfriend another thought.

His face appeared on TV, extolling the virtues of a local car dealership whose lot he would otherwise never set foot on. Danny insisted he needed to appeal to the common people, the ones who spent money on tickets, who paid his salary and bought the products he endorsed and had made him wealthy, especially when so many had questioned their investment after his disciplinary issues. All well and good, but he wouldn’t be caught dead in an American car regardless. Disgusted, he clicked it off as Johnny bellowed, “What’s up?” into the phone.

“Hey, it’s Sasha. Get me an eight-ball. I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Damn right you will.”

“Whatever. See you soon.”

She will never in a thousand lifetimes have anything to do with you again.
He had already resigned himself to that sad fact. He could take no path through this world that wasn’t wrong somehow, that wouldn’t be cut apart and criticized. He might as well enjoy the journey.

Johnny arrived an hour later. Alex paid him seventy bucks for the eight-ball and another hundred for his trouble.

“Pleasure doing business with you.” Johnny shook his hand. Alex’s gaze fell upon the inverted
L
shape beneath his jacket. A handgun. “You need me to hook you up with anything else, you let me know.”

“Will do. Thanks.”

He stared at the little plastic bag. “Sorry,
devochka
,” he whispered. He grabbed a book he’d left on the breakfast bar plus a twenty and a credit card from his wallet, poured a fraction of the bag’s contents onto the book, and divided it into lines. Alex rolled the twenty and, leaning over the book, pressed a fingertip to his right nostril. He placed the bill at his left nostril and held it at the head of the first line. And snorted.

The lines vanished within seconds. He sniffed, threw his head back so the drip would slide down his throat, and ran his hand over his nose, leaving a red smear on his skin. His heart pounded.

“
Blya!
” He slapped his hands on the counter. He’d already forgotten what had precluded him from partaking sooner.

He hurled the crutches into the living room, where they clattered across the walnut floor. He could do anything. What he most aspired to do, to amplify the orgasmic euphoria of being high, was to fuck. Alex snatched his phone again. Everything was so bright, and boundless in its possibilities. He called one of the dancers from the same club who, he recalled, lived nearby. She’d chosen a stage name inspired by a spice or something. Ginger? Jasmine? Honey?

She arrived within minutes, and he fucked her for an hour—on his back, reverse cowgirl, until he came down. He did not remember her face, but he’d remember that apple-shaped ass and her complete acquiescence to his insistence he put his dick in it. He gave her money for her trouble too. He’d meant it as a gift, though some part of his subconscious acknowledged it as the prostitution it was. But he had become too busy hobbling back and forth in a cripple’s approximation of pacing, glancing out the windows for signs of the police, to care. She slipped out. He did not say good-bye.

Alone again. In the cold, harsh mindfulness between highs, he contemplated how he had given up on himself, on the possibility of playing again, and on reuniting with Stephanie, in whom he had placed all hope. Whom he had believed with an idiot’s conviction was his to keep, though the few feathers she’d left behind now shone no brighter than ashes. His
Sirin
, for whom he’d have abandoned the world to follow even to his end. Whose song he could no longer hear because she sang only for the happy. Whom he could no longer see because she was as elusive, as evanescent, as joy itself.

Alex wiped his damp cheeks and hopped back into the kitchen to cut another set of lines. He did not wish to be better, because he was incapable of it. Somewhere in her heart, Stephanie had known. She’d jumped out of the elevator while she had the chance, leaving him trapped and freefalling.

Jacob was wrong. She wouldn’t have left if she hadn’t given up on him too.

Chapter Twenty-One

He could not pinpoint the day it happened, because they had all begun to meld together in an amorphous gray ooze, like a child’s crayons left to melt in the sun, punctuated by PT appointments and meaningless workouts, but something in him shattered. He’d always felt so much, good or bad; both a blessing and a curse, he could rely on his emotions, be it love or determination or pride, or deep and persistent sadness. So much sadness these past few months, an uncontrollable despondency that left him in tears without warning. But on this morning, Alex awoke to a featureless, desolate nothing that had engulfed his soul’s landscape like an advancing desert, and the sweet euphoria of cocaine did nothing but abandon him to a crash that magnified his absentee emotions. Feelings once breaking against him in waves, now a still and stagnant pond breeding indifference.

For too many minutes, he stood at the mirror and forced a smile, only to find his contortions resembled those a psychopath might make in the horror movies Stephanie loved so much. The capacity to form a genuine smile had escaped him, the muscles too heavy to lift. He did not have a career anymore. He did not have a girlfriend anymore. He did not even have his sadness anymore, and if he’d at least had that, then maybe he could remember happiness. He practiced because he would have to interact with other people at some point, but it was like watching an alien try on a human face. He could not make the facial muscles correspond to the expression he was attempting to create. He tested a frown. A clown’s face, grotesque and exaggerated.

“I hate you,” he said, his voice lifeless, and put his fist through the glass. His split knuckles dribbled blood onto the porcelain tile floor. He wiped them on his boxer-briefs and flexed his fingers. It no longer mattered if he broke his hands; they were of no use to anyone now. Nor was he.

He did not bother to dress. He drifted into the living room, a ghost haunting his own home. He slid open the balcony’s glass doors, stepped out, and gazed down twenty-two stories at the parking lot. An early spring wind scoured his face, his bare chest and arms. He imagined it flaying his skin and carrying pieces of him away, though pieces had already vanished and he did not know where they had gone, or how, or why. The gray sky became black, and in the black an even deeper darkness, a hairline fissure separating the misery of life from its coldest truth: that salvation, however bitter, lay in his hands.

In defiance of every living thing’s innate survival instinct, he wished he would stop being alive. Without topography to guide him back through the wasteland into which he’d wandered, he would keep plodding in circles until, exhausted, he granted himself the mercy of nonexistence. He would shatter most of his bones, split open his skull. A horrible mess, but it would be over. There would be a closed casket to hide his smashed body.
What a sad way to go
, people would say.
He was so handsome.
So rich.
So young.
As though any of those things guaranteed him perpetual happiness, or any happiness whatsoever.

He left the balcony and wandered into the kitchen. If he owned a gun, he would have put a bullet through his brain by now. If he hadn’t run out of coke, he’d have snorted it all and chased it with booze. He studied the set of kitchen knives, selected one labeled “paring knife.” Pressed the blade to his left forearm, testing his will. He carved a line through his flesh, but the pain reminded him too much of another cut and he stopped. Pain was a sensation, not an emotion, for those had fled him as anything logical had.

A more pleasant method, at least for everyone else, shimmered in the bottles lining his bar. Combined with the painkillers, he could go to sleep and not wake again. He considered writing her a note, but then everyone would think it was her fault. And it wasn’t, not at all. He wished to die because he could not muster one iota of feeling for anything, not even for who he had loved more than anything in this wretched world.

Alex flopped into his armchair and turned on the TV. Nothing held his attention. Words, colors, and shapes without significance. He had fucked all week while on coke, and some of the girls had brought more of it. Seven days of debauchery, the stuff of legend. Snorting it off fake tits and plump asses and fucking those asses and those tits, chasing the dopamine high with blow the way he’d chased it with the love to which he was no longer entitled. But that too had failed him in the end, for it had not halted the advancing oblivion.

He tried to masturbate, but his leaden apathy prevented him from getting it up. He stared at his flaccid cock, and despite all the women who had sucked it, who had let him fuck them, despite his uncut teammates in the pros, he fixated on the way his junior-year teammates had teased him in the locker room. Most American men were circumcised. Most Russian men were not. They had called him “pig in a blanket.” Stephanie had told him they were jealous. Their dry, shriveled-up little heads couldn’t compare to the glossy pink of his. That when he fucked her, it felt like velvet. But she’d been his girlfriend, and she was obligated to say nice things.

He didn’t bother showering. His dry cleaning hung in the hallway because putting it away was too great an expenditure of effort. He melted into the chair, hoping it would absorb him and leave nothing behind. Killing himself now seemed so overwhelming an endeavor that he stared at the TV and wished for death. A heart attack. A stroke. Spontaneous combustion. The one benefit of a life without hope was that fear took its leave too, and he hadn’t the energy to fear death anyway.

He remained tethered to the world enough for a vague awareness of time passing, of light filling the room and then fading away. It may have happened several times, but he was no longer keeping track. He got up to piss and to get a drink and grabbed the painkillers on his way out of the bathroom. Then he sat in darkness and watched the moonrise through the windows. He contemplated why anyone would continue with life when every day was the same. In a few months, he wouldn’t have PT appointments anymore. And then, a ceaseless vacuum of days blurring together in an existence devoid of all meaning. A song stuck on repeat. An endless flight over featureless plains where nothing was memorable because nothing mattered.

He shook out a handful of pills, shoveled them into his mouth, then guzzled another glass of vodka and laid his head back on the chair. His stomach cramped. A sudden and violent chill engulfed him, even after he swaddled himself in two blankets, even as sweat saturated his skin. His head ached. The room spun. He leaned over and vomited on the floor.

Alex groped for his phone and found it wedged in the chair cushion. He forced his heavy eyelids open long enough to scroll through his contacts, though the numbers were swirling, colluding against him. He’d wanted this, after all. How dare he try to take it back?

“Hello?”

“Jacob,” he slurred.

“Who—Sasha?”

“I think…I did something bad.”

“Dude, you sound completely fucked up. What’s wrong?”

“I think…I think…I need help.”

“Sit tight, okay? I’ll be there in five.”

The phone slipped from his hand and thunked onto the floor. The empty tumbler followed, the glass smashing on the hardwood. He dozed off. Then the door was banging open, and Jacob and the security guard were standing over him.

“Hey, Frank.” He furrowed his brow. “Why are you in my condo?”

“He had to let me in,” Jacob said. “Jesus, when was the last time you took a shower? Ugh, God.” He dodged the puddle of congealing vomit and shards of broken glass. “What did you do to your arm? Oh shit.” He snatched the bottle of pills away. “Frank, call an ambulance!”

***

He’d lost consciousness before they reached the hospital, and woke in a private room with a breathing tube down his raw throat. An IV dripped fluid into his veins. His arm and knuckles had been bandaged.

“They had to pump your stomach,” Jacob said. Alex blinked until his vision cleared. Jacob was sitting beside him on the visitor’s chair. “And gave you naloxone hydrochloride to keep you breathing.”

“I’m sorry,” he grunted around the tube.
I’m sorry I’m still breathing.

“They’ve called for a psych consult as soon as they think you can breathe on your own. Unless you can convince them it was an accident, they’ll hold you for at least seventy-two hours. The problem is it wasn’t an accident.”

Alex stared at the ceiling.

“What’s going on with you, man? You tried to kill yourself!”

He was supposed to cry or something. Feel bad. Guilty. But inside he saw only the shapeless, everlasting void eating away at whatever remained.

Somebody please make this stop.

“Listen, I’ll do whatever we need to so this stays out of the news, because that’s the last goddamn thing you need. Is there someone I can call to be here with you?”

His parents were in Russia. Stephanie was on the other side of the country. There was no one. Maybe there had never been anyone. He shook his head.

“Please,
please
tell me it wasn’t over her. I know you love her, but no one is worth this.”

He shook his head again. He couldn’t speak anyway, but how did one explain nothing? How did one fight it?

“I know you’re going through a lot. More than you should have to, and it’s happening all at once. But this? I don’t understand.”

No. He wouldn’t. No one would. Alex could barely understand it himself, except it had seemed the only way out.

“I hate to leave you here alone.”

He’d always been alone. That was the funny thing about fame. The more popular he became, the lonelier he got. Built up to be torn down by the people who believed he owed them his career, talent be damned. Waiting for him to fuck up so they could put him in his place. He sighed softly.

“I’ll be back after the morning skate tomorrow. Just…When you come off the breathing tube, be honest with the psychiatrist, okay? You don’t have to tell anyone else, but tell them.”

He nodded.

“Hang in there, Sasha.” Jacob squeezed his shoulder. “People do care about you, even if you don’t believe it right now.”

He lapsed into a fitful sleep. Early in the morning, a physician and two nurses came in for the extubation. First they checked his heart and respiratory rates and found them satisfactory. Then the doctor explained the procedure and elevated the bed so Alex was sitting upright at a ninety-degree angle. They oxygenated him, removed the tape holding the tube in place, and began suctioning.

“Breathe slowly and deeply. That’s it. All right, deep breath and cough.”

He obeyed. More suctioning, then the tube slithering out of his throat. He gagged. Soft plastic prongs entered his nostrils and with them, more oxygen.

“Very good. We’ll have someone checking on you regularly.”

“Thank you.” His voice scraped through his throat, his ears, like metal on metal, and he winced. But he owed them gratitude for wasting their time on someone who had abjured life.

He floated into a shallow sleep. A middle-aged woman was sitting in the visitor’s chair.

“Hello, Aleksandr. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Dr. Adams.”

The psychiatrist. Great.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

He stared at the opposite wall. He wrote his answer on a pad of paper they’d given him because he could not yet speak without pain.

I’m on painkillers for my tendon injury. I took some and drank some vodka.

“Intentionally?”

He did not respond. Her pen scratched against the notebook balanced on her lap.

“There was a very high dose of acetaminophen and codeine in your system. Traces of cocaine were also found. In the event of a suicide attempt, it’s policy to put the patient on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold. After the third day, we’ll evaluate your situation. As you don’t have a prior history of suicide attempts or mental illness, I expect we can release you after the hold and provide you with a list of therapists for follow-up treatment.”

So I have no choice.

“It’s for your own safety, Aleksandr. Please don’t think of this as punishment. We want to help you figure out what got you to this point and what we can do for you.”

They warehoused psychiatric patients needing care more than he did in the ER or even the hallways, while his magical name had granted him a room in an instant. He was not hallucinating. He was not violent. He simply did not wish to live any longer, which harmed no one but himself. Letting him continue to exist, on the other hand, hurt everyone.

“We will do everything in our power to keep your situation confidential in accordance with HIPAA laws. I’m aware you’re a professional hockey player.”

The best in the world, according to some. Look where it had gotten him.

“I’ll be back this afternoon to do a full assessment. Get some rest.” She patted his hand and left.

***