Body High: A Novel by Jon Lindsey

Author:Jon Lindsey [Lindsey, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Vlad Press
Published: 2021-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

10

Across the city, in another hospital, in an elevator going backward, I rise away from myself and my future, with the disorienting feeling of being pulled from the world of the present and dragged into the gravity of the past. This is the hospital of human research experiments. The same hospital where my mom came for psych ward stays and electroshock therapy.

The elevator doors open like a curtain to reveal the Intensive Care waiting room and FF sitting alone, head in hands. It reminds me of how I prevented his delivery into the world, head in hand, and forced him back up the birth canal. Makes me wonder whether we have been doing this to each other for years. Whether this is what old friends do: thwart rebirth.

FF looks up. My feet feel instantly unsteady. He sweeps a magazine off the chair beside him, onto the floor. Flop.

My impulse is to press the elevator button to a lower floor. Instead I pass through the doors, sensing again that I am dying.

At FF’s feet, the glossy pages of the magazine open to expose a broken celebrity marriage. I look from the divorce into his sleepless eyes.

Some part of me likes seeing my friend, my drug-dealer, this thin, this pitiful.

“She needs a kidney,” he says.

It confirms what I already know. That what Jolene needs, I can’t give her.

“You gotta call the Armenians,” he says.

I sit beside him. We stare at a painting on the opposite wall. A high desert landscape, arid and silent. I stand up and walk across the room, as if the fact that the painting hangs crooked is my fault. I straighten the painting. It’s still aslant. The indifference of the desert is something to admire.

FF confesses to me. Recounts the details. His re-up. His bad feeling. Driving to my apartment after the buy to get Jolene’s luggage. The bump he cut for her off the new brick. Her seizures. Convulsing on my kitchen floor. The emergency room. Her blood work that came back showing PCP, borax, and livestock de-wormer.

FF knew his plug, Angel, was stepping on his drugs. I told him. Angel was cutting FF’s product within an inch of its life. Even if Orange County didn’t notice, FF should have.

“Angel’s a dead man,” FF says.

He sounds like his wrestling character.

But I’ve stopped doubting his capacity for violence and stupidity.

I pace around the waiting room. The other art on the walls depicts saddle-back mountains and point break beaches, but I keep returning to the high desert. I imagine FF in the pastel landscape, among the Joshua trees, spiky yucca standing sentinel as he shovels a grave.

“Which one is Angel?” I ask.

“The little one.”

“They’re all little.”

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