Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney

Author:Jay McInerney [McInerney, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780517116661
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

The buzz enters through his lungs and spreads like an electric current into the bloodstream, passes Go and collects two million dollars, rockets up the spine, deposits it at the back of the skull, where it explodes in a burst of white phosphorescence—that prickly feeling in the scalp is what it feels like to step onstage in front of the screaming people, plugged into the main source, tapping into power absolute and burning with that pure, white light...

But the light fades. The light always fades, the buzz modulating into raspy static; the tingle that started on the inside of his skull has moved deep into the folds of his brain. Ace leaned back and rubbed his head against the wall as if that might soothe the sudden itch—a fiery, subcutaneous rash which must at all costs be scratched.

Holding a blackened glass pipe, he was sitting on a warped linoleum floor in a room with five other people, three men and two women. There was an old bathtub in the middle of the room, painted green long before and flaking now, filled with soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, glass vials and organic refuse. From within came the rustle of paper, sounds of scratching and mastication. Claws.

Oh, man, he thought. Ugly.

At one end of the dim, narrow room, a fat man in a distended Billy Idol T-shirt perched on a tall chrome stool that appeared to have been uprooted from an old luncheonette, filling the doorway with his bulk. At the other end of the room was a second, closed door. The steel had been crudely blowtorched at chest level and fitted with a sliding panel. Behind the door a sweating homeboy huddled like an astronaut inside an armored capsule, a former bedroom also paneled in steel; a shoulder-wide triple-bolted steel hatch opened to a hole punched through the brick wall of the adjoining tenement, providing a handy escape route.

Two brothers in fishnet shirts slouched in the corner, looking psychotic—Ace glanced away real quick, lest they think he was dissing them. A white boy gazed longingly at the oracular glass pipe in his hand: in his football jersey he looked as if he'd just driven in from the suburbs, a boy who was going to be late for geography class the next day. After staring for several minutes at the blackened, empty tube, he stood up, tacked over to the rear door and, with all the dignity he could muster, knocked on the little steel panel. The panel slid back and a voice barked. "Yeah?"

"You take checks?"

"Get out my face, Jack."

The panel slammed shut. The boy slumped back against the wall with his hands over his face.

Ace could relate to that, having just finished his last, having run through forty bucks. Six left, which was as good as nothing, unless he split a dime with one of these disgusting dope fiends. Looking down at his feet he wondered what anybody might pay for a pair of reasonably new high-top Ponys.

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