“Yes,” she said in a small voice.
“Look, these people... they’re okay. Look, don’t let the neighborhood throw you. They’re okay, Helen. They’re... well, they’re my kind of people. Our kind of people.”
“Yes.”
“So... so you can’t expect, you know, real plush surroundings. Like... like if the cops busted in here, they’d find enough stuff to... well, look, Helen, holding’s against the law, so you got to... well, look, it’s good to be with your own, you know? You’ll see. But let’s get started, huh? Jesus, let’s get started.”
“Yes.”
“You all right?”
“Yes. But... they look so dirty.”
“Jesus!”
“Dirty,” she said again, and then a strange look passed over her face. She sighed heavily. “Let’s... do what we have to.”
“Well, gee, don’t say it like that. Hell, this is a lot of kicks. Jesus, you don’t have to say it like that.” He paused. “Hell, you’re not punishing yourself or anything, baby.” He chuckled loudly.
“No,” she said.
“Okay, okay. So, come on, let’s see a little smile. Come on, come on, live it up a little.”
She smiled weakly.
“There. There, now that’s a hell of a lot better.” He picked up two bottle caps from the sink. “Come on,” he said.
They went into the other room. The skinny blonde had moved. She was sitting up in the chair now. The room was more crowded than Helen had originally thought. There was a sickly-sweet aroma to the room, a nauseatingly sweet smell mixed with the stink of body sweat. She looked for a window, spotted one high up on the basement wall. A candle burned in the neck of a beer bottle, and she realized abruptly that this was the only source of light. Someone struck a match, and she saw the angular bones of a grayish masculine face, and then a cigarette flared into life, and then the match died, and there was only the flickering light of the candle again, and the blonde in the light lifting her skirt.
No one looked at the blonde. Her legs were very thin, pipestem legs with bony knees, covered with thick blond fuzz, sickly white in the pale glow of the candle. Helen stared at her and then blinked.
The inner soft fleshy white of her thigh was stained with the same blurred pattern of puncture marks that had been on the girl’s arms. Only here they seemed more destructive. Here, the flesh seemed more vulnerable. Here, the needle had attacked a secret flesh, a private flesh, and Helen stared, wanting to turn away, but fascinated and incapable of turning. The girl had something in her hand. It took Helen several moments in the dim light to realize what it was. A safety pin.
The girl moved with the awkward precision of a robot. She brought the pin down against the white flesh, and then she began poking at it, tearing at the flesh. Helen stared. A blue area of puffed skin capped the upper part of the scar tissue like a tarnished crown. The girl poked at the bruised area, piercing the skin, ripping it, and then quickly, she dropped the safety pin and picked up an eye dropper.
Helen felt suddenly ill. She turned away, her stomach churning. She could not watch. She wanted to run out of this basement room, wanted to get away from these people, but something inside her urged her to stay. She had to stay. She had to do... she had to do...
“Can’t see my friggin’ hand in front of my face,” someone mumbled.
A light snapped on. The blonde blinked her eyes against it. Her face was pitted. The eye dropper lay on an orange crate beside her chair now, a blackened bottle cap beside it. The girl was beginning to doze. In the light Helen looked at her exposed thigh, and again she felt her stomach churning.
A man came over to Andy. She looked at the man’s arms. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and she saw the scar tissue, and then she saw a series of festering scabs and sores.
“They picked up Alverra, you hear?” the man said.
“Yeah,” Andy said.
The man shrugged and went into the kitchen. Sitting on one of the chairs, another man began humming “Blues in the Night” off key.
“Come on, Helen,” Andy said. “Sit down.”
She followed him, and she sat. He was loading a syringe. She saw the milky white fluid ooze out of the bottle cap and into the glass cylinder. He depressed the plunger, forcing any air bubbles out of the syringe, and then he looked down at her. He took a piece of twine from his jacket pocket and wrapped it around her arm, and she watched as the vein bulged, blue against the white of her skin.
“You ready?” he said.
She squeezed her eyes shut tightly. This was what she wanted. This. Andy had what she wanted. Andy had offered what she wanted. This. These were her people.
She did not answer. She nodded, and then someone flicked off the light again, and she heard the whisper of shoe soles against the floor, and then the creak of wood as the person sat again. The vein slid with rubbery resistance beneath the needle. Andy clasped her arm more tightly, and then the needle pierced her flesh, and she felt only a slight pain, and then the needle was gone.
It hit her hard and fast.
She was beginning to float. She felt clean and strong and pure. She felt marvelously free. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything, anything!
It only took sixteen seconds for the drug to pass through her heart and her lungs and then roar into her blood stream. And in sixteen seconds she had stopped hating herself.
Andy did not remember much afterward.
He very rarely remembered much afterward.
Everything seemed blurred together in a haze of half-remembrance. But there was music, a faint music, there was always music, queer and weird, but a perfect music, half understood and half harmonious, but cacophonous too, but music, always music, all music, always the clear hard bite of brass, music he wished he could make himself.
And there was a ceiling somewhere very far off, and there were walls which slanted to touch the tiny square of ceiling so very far off. And there was a vast field of white.
He walked across the field, and he left no footprints.
There was sound everywhere in the field, but it was a soundless sound, a music he alone could hear. There were no trees in the field, no bushes, no growth of any kind. The sky was a pale blue, cloudless, a wash of color against the field of white.
He could touch the sky.
He was enormous against the white field and the pale blue sky, and he could reach up and touch the blue, and the God Father smiled at him when he reached the sky, so close to Heaven was he, and he could hear his own breathing, echoing and re-echoing to become a part of the i music, the way someone breathes when he is sucking in ether, and he could feel the warmth of the music all around him, a trumpet blowing soft and lazy, warm, moist, and he knew he was in another land, and this other land was good, and he did not want to go back because this was good, this was good.
He found the lunch pail, and he opened it, and there was a trumpet inside the lunch pail, and he touched the trumpet and the trumpet felt vibrantly alive to his touch. The Geld of white was wet now, and he walked through it with his rubbers on, and his feet did not get wet, but the white was scalding hot, whitely hot, scalding in its intensity, and he was suddenly frightened, and he ran with his trumpet clutched to his chest, the lunch pail clattering soundlessly to the hot Geld of white, the rubbers slipping from his feet so that the white burned the soles of his feet, and he thought in panic, I’m in Hell, in Hell, in Hell in Hell in, and he was no longer afraid, and then he was nodding, and then he was asleep, and there was only a very tiny insignificant red dot of blood among the puncture marks on his arm to show that a needle had entered his flesh at all.