She stretched her arms up and back on the rug, her crotch rising to push him inside as deep as he could go. “Mateo.” She said his name like a four-year-old. “Thank you, Mateo. You were right.”
He reached forward, held her hands bound over her head. He’d won. He felt powerfully evil, somewhere fathoms beneath his slo-mo bliss. He was still M-Dreem!
“I was right, baby,” he said, smashing her mouth down into the rug with his own, rising and falling on her like a weapon of destruction. Oh fuck, he thought, I shouldn’t have been born, but since I was, this is what I was put here to do. Spiking and fucking. He was delirious. For maybe twenty seconds, which felt like two hours, he felt that his body had melded with Carrie’s body, but now, even as he fucked her, more and more slowly, he felt himself soaring away from her in black space. It was all about him and that woman, their unholy alliance, him carrying on her whorish work of nothingness, until, when finally his head came up and he looked at Carrie, he saw instead her face from that snapshot and his own face, merged into one.
“Fucking God!” he gasped, shattering the slowness, leaping out of Carrie and off her body, flopping with a spasm on his back next to her, grabbing his dick for dear life.
“What is it?” Carrie said, but it was a drooling slur; she could barely fix her eyes on Mateo.
I think this H is cut with something, acid or X, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t — he just stared up at Carrie with the pleading, terrified eyes of a child, holding his dick.
“I feel something different, too,” she said. She climbed onto him, lowered herself, arched back and out of his view. She was having her revenge on him now. It went on and on. He flopped his head to the side so that the two of them, though joined at the center, could have been leagues away from each other, and he gave himself over to crying quietly. It felt cathartic and vivid amid the more numb bliss of the H high. He cried and cried, letting himself be a little baby, while she rode him, and the next thing he knew, she was nodding on top of him, with him still inside her.
Slowly, slowly, hearing the suck of the sweat around their groins, he pulled her off him. “Mateo!” she protested once, popping awake for about six seconds, before he gently shoved her onto the rug. He crawled toward his pants to retrieve his cell phone; he was feeling an incredible need for Hector, whose beat-up couch in that shithole apartment back in New York had become Mateo’s favorite place to nod before he went to rehab; Hector, too manic to be a true heroin fan, would watch over Mateo while tweaking on meth and ushering various visitors in and out of his back bedroom.
Mateo had gotten used to the tremendous feeling of safety of knowing that Hector was watching him as he nodded, and he missed it now and wanted to reach out to Hector, to see if he was in Palm Springs. He pulled out his cell phone, whose battery was nearly run down. There was a text from Drew: “Please come home or go to a hospital. At least text me back and tell me where you are. I love you.” There was a text from his sponsor: “What’s going on? You don’t have to do this, you know. You think you do, but you don’t. It’s as easy as calling me.” Mateo deleted them both. There were voice mails from them as well, but he deleted those without even listening.
Hector’s cell number was burned into Mateo’s memory, a huge trigger to use just like the sight of a needle. He texted Hector: “Im in LA where r u u fuking freakshow? r u in palm spring?”
The cell in his hand, he crawled on his naked belly across the rug — oh God, all that scratchiness felt good, alongside the scratchiness inside him — and pulled up against Carrie — but wait, was she breathing? Yes, she was breathing. Slowly, but breathing. He held her close, kissing her neck, until his dick was fully erect again. Then he pushed her legs open and eased his way back inside her from behind.
“Mateo,” she mumbled, bucking back toward him. Deep inside her, he nodded again, not reviving until the cell vibrated in his half-open hand. He checked it. “Fuck yeah this is crazy Im in ps,” read the text from Hector. “Address? Ill cum 2 u.”
Mateo smiled. Hector would “cum” and make it all right, take care of him and Carrie. Hector was always going on about how much he loved Palm Springs, the dry air and the sprawling desert-scrub landscapes and the big gay parties. How did fucking destitute Hector even get the money for a flight to Palm Springs anymore, Mateo wondered, or for a rental car? How’d he make it across the country with his drugs without getting busted? Where’d he put the fucking dog? Well, who cared, thought Mateo. He was coming.
“What’s the address here?” he asked Carrie, the cell poised.
“Why?” she mumbled.
“A friend of mine wants to come over.”
She squirmed unhappily. “Why?”
“It’s good,” Mateo said. “He doesn’t really do H so he can watch us while we nod.”
She told him the address and he texted it to Hector, an act that felt like it took an hour. Then, still inside Carrie, Mateo nodded back out.
The door buzzer buzzed. Mateo looked at his cell. It was 3:42 A.M. — more than two hours had passed. It buzzed again. Gingerly, Mateo pulled out of Carrie. He managed to stand and pull on jeans. He shuffled his way to the door, hit the buzzer, looked through the peephole and smiled. There was Fagfunk, dark glasses on in the middle of the fucking night. Mateo opened the door. Hector was with some beanpole, fake-blond, meth-skinned little gay rat, barely dressed in a drooping Lady Gaga tank top and fucking purple leggings under short-shorts. What the fuck? Mateo stepped aside and they hurried in, anxious to get out of the hallway.
“This is fucking crazy, negrito, we’re both on the Left Coast,” Freakshow said, his glasses still on, his fagfunk emanating off his too-tight white jeans and tank top. “Why didn’t you tell me you were gonna be out here? You haven’t come by in a while. Remember I told you I come out here every year for a big party? I got lots of friends out here.”
Hector talked a blue streak while Mateo stared at him, slack-jawed. Hector’s torso was more concave on top, flabbed out on the bottom, than the last time Mateo had seen him. His head was shaved and someone had given him a bad tattoo on his neck — some scary-ass kind of cartoon cat. As for his twitching tweaker sidekick — God, thought Mateo, the kid looked like he was twenty-three going on forty-six. His skin and teeth were a wreck.
“What the fuck are you doing out here?” Hector asked again. But Mateo didn’t answer. He was nodding, his eyes heavy-lidded, swaying on his feet in front of them.
“Oh, shit,” the beanpole tweaker piped up. “They are out of it.”
But Mateo didn’t care. Freakshow was here. Mateo managed to put an affectionate hand on Hector’s shoulder. “Freakshow,” he mumbled. “New York City freak.”
“You’ve gotten worse since the last time I saw you,” Hector observed, guiding Mateo into the room, where the TV, which had been on low for hours and hours, was now broadcasting what looked like a cable-access talk show out of someone’s basement. He dropped Mateo on the futon before he noticed Carrie, naked, legs splayed, barely breathing on the rug.
“Holy fucking shit,” Hector said. “Is she OD’ing?”
Beanpole just stood in the doorway, looking around frantically, while Hector knelt down by Carrie and pulled up her head. Amid his nod, Mateo felt contentment. Freakshow would fix up him and Carrie. Mateo knew Hector was opening up his backpack with his sex toys and his porn and his lube and his cherished little black box with the glass meth pipe inside; he knew Hector was propping up Carrie and putting the pipe to her lips; he knew she was suddenly sitting up in that dazed, buzzing, time-stands-still nexus between nodding and tweaking Mateo had dwelt in a few times with Hector. Mateo knew she wouldn’t OD now. Hector came around to Mateo next, put the pipe to Mateo’s lips.