2: The Precipice

Photo by Lizardman123

4/23/95
It’s almost four in the morning and Lisa’s still shrooming, but I’m the one who’s having the fucked-up visions. A vast, eternal, limitless void is opening up in front of me, and I see the future stretch out to infinity. It’s a terrifying oblivion of wants and needs and responsibilities and realities that I know I’d have to deal with if I end up getting involved with this chick and her insanely addictive personality.

I imagine the years of fights and trash and therapy and hospitals and counseling and all that shit and the enormity of it all is suddenly pressing down on me with the weight of a planet and I just can’t fucking deal with this right now. I shouldn’t have come. I should just fucking bail as soon as I possibly can. There’s no real point in sleeping much anyway.

I open my eyes and move my head up the pillow and stare at the bare wall, inches from my face. I can only stand to do this for a few seconds so I glance at Lisa to see if she’s still awake. The only light is a sliver of white peeking in from under the door, barely illuminating her face, and I can see she’s conscious, wide-eyed and staring my way, but it doesn’t seem like she’s looking at anything I can see right now.

Maybe she is, though- right now she’s sure primed to notice something like the yawning abyss that’s threatening to envelop both of us if we take this thing any further. I try to remember how we got to this point in the first place but for some reason- probably the first vile waves of a hangover- I can’t concentrate on that or much of anything.

Lisa rolls over to face away from me and shivers a little, which is kind of weird because it’s been like eighty degrees outside for the past two days. It was so oppressively hot when I got off the train six hours ago that I almost choked right there on the platform, and even now I still feel like I’m chewing the air instead of breathing it. I prop myself up on my elbows and take a look across the room to check if her roommate (whose name I forgot) is still awake like she was when Lisa and I were fooling around, and I guess she passed out at some point cause I can sort of see a person-sized lump on the other bed moving in the rhythm of regular breathing.

“Go back to sleep, Derek.” Lisa whispers, the sound muffled by her sheets, and probably by her state of mind.

“I haven’t slept yet,” I say, resting my chin on the mashed pillow again.

“Oh,” she says flatly. “Why not?”

Because you asked me to come see you and you didn’t know why. Because I actually did come see you and I didn’t know why. Because you can’t decide why you don’t know why. Because you couldn’t decide how to introduce me to anyone at the party we went to tonight. Because you’re high and I’m not. Because half an hour ago you let me fuck you and I still can’t figure out why.

I don’t say that, though, and instead reply “I told you, I slept on the train.” I’m trying to remember the point when I knew this trip was a bad idea and I guess it was probably somewhere around the ninth of fourteen hours on that fucking train. It was a soul-crushing journey north from Santa Barbara, taken on a whim when things got too heavy at school and an email from Lisa offered a way out.

That’s how it all started about a month ago- an email from Lisa Arroyo out of nowhere, the same Lisa who wouldn’t give me the goddam time of day back in high school, the same Lisa who, supposedly, didn’t hesitate to foist her own hangups on even her best friends, the same Lisa who barely hung on academically to make it into Chico State once those people stopped doing her homework for her.

I was never suspicious, but I didn’t think I had any reason to be. I was still relatively numb from the rest of my life up to that point; only three months before, I’d succeeded in getting myself and my little sister kicked out of our father’s house during Christmas dinner. He’d threatened to subject us to midnight mass, which neither of us were in the mood for after three days dealing with our stepmom and her family. We had our mom’s car, so we left that night.

I had told this story, with considerable embellishment and self-pity, to Lisa over the course of about six or seven expletive-laced emails. She in turn had her own soap opera going with an ex-boyfriend, and the poisonous fallout of their relationship- sex, violence, cocaine- colored most of her correspondence too.

Lisa seemed to lighten up a bit over the course of it, though, and she said that she always looked forward to hearing from me. I didn’t really give any of it much weight- I didn’t have time to sit around in the computer lab all day to check email, but apparently she did. Unfortunately for me, one of her importunate reminders arrived at my inbox just as I’d been booted off the soccer team and had lost my scholarship because some asshole tipped off the coach that I had come to practice stoned on several occasions.

I wasn’t the only one who had, and it wasn’t like it was fucking steroids or anything, but that didn’t matter. Coach went on a rampage and I was done. I explained all this to Lisa that night (she’d given me her number a while back), and she’d made the perfect reply.
“Well, why don’t you come up here and lay low for a while?” she’d said. “Just get the fuck out of there and spend some quality time away from all that shit?”

It seemed like a great idea at the time. I didn’t feel like owning up to anything once my mom found out, so I took Lisa up on her offer, packed my old green Adidas bag, and hoofed it to the train station that same day. One numbing Amtrak ride later, I was trying to keep up with Lisa at a Chico frat party, as we rubbed elbows with plastered jocks from Truckee who kept telling sick jokes about the Oklahoma City bombing four days ago.

I belatedly realized what I was in for once I watched her and her roommate giddily force down some mushrooms and then chase them with Skittles. Leery of rearranging my already-surreal surroundings, I’d refused any, and then had in turn, like some leprous narc, been refused anything stronger than watery keg beer. I don’t remember much after that, but I’m pretty sure the night went downhill from there. Awkward sex with badly hallucinating girls might sound like fun, but in this case it definitely was not.

A vicious snore from Lisa tells me she’s finally asleep. Quietly and carefully, I shift the sheets, slip out of bed, and get dressed. Maybe she wakes up for a second as I’m packing all my shit up, but I’m not really sure and truthfully don’t care that much anyway. About an hour has passed, and by the time I get to the train station, four blocks away, it will be dawn, and time to go home.

Next: Immobilized At Dawn