twilight
By Robert Hyers.
“Your shoulder blades move like angel wings,” he told me once.
He said the heroin made him a better poet. He would wrap that ratty leather belt around his thin bicep and pull it tight with his teeth, just like in the movies. His body mapped the history of his relationship with the drug, as did mine. Blue trail marks ran up and down his alabaster arms and legs. When we started we only injected between our toes so that no one else knew, but eventually we had to chart new territory. He’d push the liquid through the syringe and into his bloodstream. His eyes would roll back. The warmth would wrap around him and the rush would go through him. Then he’d relax. He would take the needle from his bicep, and give it to me. By then I’d have prepped my arm, and would inject the rest. Within seconds there would be no more day or night, no more waking or sleeping, just a beautiful state somewhere in-between.
“We’re living in a constant twilight,” he wrote on some scrap of paper that’s been lost through the years, perhaps burned during cooking.
The last time he spoke to me was Easter Sunday. I knew the day because a man in robes was preaching behind a slow rising sun on my little television. The sun had just started rising, bathing him in a divine glow he didn’t deserve. We were in my old bedroom from when I was a kid; my parents couldn’t stand us living on the street any longer. The room stayed as I had left it, with this ancient little television that had a picture of me from ten years ago sitting on it. I was smiling in my soccer uniform, holding the ball at my knee, all superimposed against a flash of lightning.
“I can’t do it,” he said with heavy eyelids. I knew what he wanted, but he was too high. I had refused him before, which usually led to being alone, and I didn’t want to risk that right now. So I cooked the heroin and carefully deposited in the syringe. I felt my shoulder blades move behind me as I took his arm in my hand and wrapped the belt.
“We’re two skeletons/skin stretched tight over us.” That scrap I still have.
Then I looked for a vein. It was taking longer to find one; more and more were collapsing every day. I finally found one and injected. By now the sun on the television had fully risen, and its light from the cathode ray reflected off the syringe.
I held his bones in mine for a few hours. I knew he wasn’t alive, but he couldn’t be dead either. Later that day, when my head was clear, I cried. I finally could accept that he’d traveled somewhere I couldn’t follow. Then I called the paramedics.
Whether I liked it or not, our constant twilight had ended.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Hyers lives with his partner and a few pets in a Philadelphia suburb. To see his other published work, just go to roberthyers.com. And feel free to leave a comment or two while you’re there.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, August 19th, 2007.
