Baccano! - Volume 4 - Chapter 4

DOPE ADDICT

Ahhhh, this feels great. Absolute tops.

Could there possibly be any other word to describe this state?

Maybe, but I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t need to.

Everything’s here. It’s all here, inside my brain.

Everything’s melting together right before my eyes. Ah, the sky and the ground and the forest and the town and the day and the night were all one, in the beginning. I’ve just arrived at the truth. My fingers are melting, too; my arms, my legs, my hips, my stomach, my chest, my bones, my heart… They’re melting, blending with everything around me. I’m enfolding everything I see. Right now, I’m on the brink of becoming the world itself.

My eyeballs have started to melt. Ohh, I’m looking at everywhere, from everything in the world.

I can feel everything in this melted world. It’s a very quiet pleasure.

At last. I’ve completely merged with the world.

“………y, Roy……”

A crack runs through the world.

Who’s that? Who’s trying to break my world? Stop, stop it, look what you’ve done; my eyeballs went back to their regular shape. My vision’s back to normal. Oh, my body, my body’s being cut off from the world. Stop it, stopstopstopstopstopstopstop!

“Roy…… Roy……”

My body gets reconstructed in midair, then starts falling toward the chaotic world. There’s a whistling sound as I slice through the wind, and the world keeps breaking down. The sky and the ground and the people and the town and the day and the night all fall back into their separate shapes. My dream and reality part ways here, too, and only the reality keeps plummeting toward the ground.

“Roy!”

Then my body hits the ground and smashes to bits.

Staring up at an institutional ceiling, the man—Roy Maddock—gave a full-body shiver. Immediately afterward, he shot up from the bed as if he were on springs and raked his surroundings with a glare. He saw several men and women, sitting or lying down; all wore the same hollow expression.

“Roy, pull yourself together!”

In the center of his vision, a woman was yelling something.

I know this dame… It’s… Oh yeah. It’s my girl, Edith.

He also understood that she’d pulled him back to “this side.” Roy’s eyes still weren’t focusing, but he turned them away from her, clicking his tongue in irritation.

“What’s with the attitude?! Roy, I thought you might really die this time, so I—”

Edith’s shout clanged away in Roy’s brain. The vibrations passed through his head, reverberating down his spine.

“This, after I told you over and over! After you promised you’d get yourself clean! Why are you here again?!”

The wound on his neck that he’d gotten during a previous trip started to throb, as if it had just remembered the sensation. With that, finally, his mind woke up completely and understood that it was back in reality.

Bleeeargh.

At the same time, with no hesitation, he spat out the substance that welled up from his stomach.

Nearly colorless vomit spattered over the concrete floor. However, Edith only grimaced slightly, and none of the people around them yelled.

It wasn’t a physical side effect of the drug itself. The terror and anxiety of being abruptly pulled back to reality had had an instantaneous effect on his digestive system.

There was a reason the room’s floor was rough concrete. Vomiting and pants-pissing were everyday occurrences here, and it was completely undecorated in order to make it as easy as possible to clean.

In short, this was a recreation room with a specific purpose: It was dedicated to the use of a certain type of drug.

After he’d vomited to the side for a little while, Roy spoke, sounding annoyed.

“How should I know what I promised when I was sober? I don’t bring no real-life stuff in here.”

“Don’t you give me that! And here I thought you were back on the right track… What happened?”

In answer to her question, Roy picked up a bag of powder that had been near him.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about. There are several drugs that have been circulating around here recently that aren’t like weed and coke. They’re new types. That means they ain’t illegal yet. I’m not committing a crime or nothing. What’s the problem, huh?”

“You know that’s not what this is about! If you keep this up, you’ll die! Do you have any idea how moronic you look when you’re hopped up? You might as well be a beached, dying octopus or squid! Just look at the faces of the people around here!”

As if to shake off the rest of the sermon, Roy raised his voice a bit roughly:

“Say what you want about me, but don’t you disrespect my friends. And hey, you’re a waitress at a speakeasy. I don’t want to hear this from somebody who’s breaking the law.”

Flinching a bit at those words, as one would expect, Edith fell silent, looking chagrined.

“Why not go crying to your Gandor bosses, then?” Roy sneered. “You can’t, can you? The Gandors are tough on drugs. Plus, this is the stuff their enemy the Runorata Family is spreading around! You’ve known I was hooked on this stuff for ages, and you kept quiet about it. The Gandors’ll probably kill me, but you won’t get off scot-free—”

Having ranted that far, Roy abruptly fell silent. He’d realized that Edith was tearing up.

“I don’t care what happens to me, it’s just—I’m being quiet because I don’t want you to die, Roy! But I think I’m at the end of my rope there, too! If I have to watch you break like this, you…you should just go die!”

Once she’d screamed the last of those words, she left Roy without looking back.

As Roy heard the door slam, his expression began to crumple rapidly.

“Wait, I, why did… Why did I make her cry? No, I— …Yeah, that’s right, I broke a promise, so I shoulda apologized, right? That was wrong, I…huh? Why did I do that?”

As he thought back over what he’d done, sadness and regret welled up together in his heart.

“Wait, wait, wait! I was wrong. No matter how you look at it, it couldn’t be anyone but me. Why was she crying? That’s wrong. I’m the one who should cry, right? I’m the one who shoulda gotten yelled at and cried, right? That’s not okay, hey, wait, waitwait, wait, why aren’t you here, why, wait, please wait, c’mon, c’mon…”

Roy lowered his head and began to sob, quietly.

“Wait… Please, wait. How’m I supposed to apologize this way…?”

Watching him, a man and woman in a corner of the room began talking quietly to each other.

“The girl should just break up with that loser,” the woman whispered.

“Uh? Hunh, their relationship ain’t so shallow a little fight like that could bust it up.”

The drugs seemed to have worn off for the pair a while back, and they were watching Roy with comparatively clear eyes.

“Besides, the stuff the dame said was wrong,” the man continued.

“What part?”

“Even if the Gandors don’t tumble to this, that Roy fella’s gonna die soon. If you look at it that way, he’d have a better shot at surviving if she snitched on him to the Gandors and begged.”

“Die? You mean fly a bit too high? But they said that drug’s safe for you, physically…”

“Well, that’s obviously just a Runorata lie! And even if it were true, it’s like calling down the Grim Reaper, right into your body. No way to get away from that… See, that guy, he got high on heroin, just once, and when he did, he gashed up his neck with his fingernails. Shredded it. That ain’t a normal reaction. He’s too sensitive to drugs. You probably don’t know, but with heroin, you don’t get high the first time. It just makes you sick. You do it a few times, get used to it, and then you dive into the other side. That guy, though, he flew somewhere weird on his very first try.”

He drew a small wallet from an inner pocket and took a few bags of powder from inside it.

“After he landed in the hospital, Edith frantically talked him down. Well, he’d just started, so he managed to shake the hop pretty easily, but then he went right out and tried the stuff the Runorata fellas are scattering around. He fell for that idiotic ‘No physical withdrawal symptoms’ line real easy. I mean, c’mon, there’s no way anything’s that good!”

As the man spoke, he opened a new bag of drugs.

“Well, and I’m the bonehead who knows that and still does it. As a rule, most guys who get into drugs are idiots. But that’s the thing. That’s what’s good about it… That’s it. Heh-heh, heh-ha-ha.”

I have to apologize to Edith.

I left the room. That’s a start. But I’ve got no idea how to face her.

This time, this time for sure, I’ll quit. If I do, she’ll understand, too. And anyway, I used up the last of my money on this one bag. They said it was some new kind of upper. Uppers are rough when you come down, but if you don’t have the drug, you’ve just gotta get through it.

So, okay, this is the last one. I’ve gotta use it carefully. I mean, it’s my very last hit, so I want to fly like it’s going out of style.

I think I maybe thought something like this when I made that promise to Edith before, but I’m positive my will was weak that time. I’ll be fine now. I’ve grown, too. I can make this dose the last one.

Ohhh, here we go here we go here we go damn this is crazy whoa-ho-ho this is awesome, the right side of my brain is sorta jumpin’! Man, it feels like my right brain’s about to blow! Hey, I can see rainbows! Wow, what is this, huh? Me? Does the body I’m moving belong to me? Is the brain that’s thinking stuff right now really mine? Whoa, I could do anything now! I just surpassed myself! So brains can evolve, huh? My consciousness is jumping to the future!

Awesome, this is so awesome. What’s awesome? I’m awesome!

I can do it, I can do it! Now, I can do anything!

AnythingAnythingAnythingAnythingAnything 

I’m awake.

Apparently, I’d come back to my apartment at some point, because the stuff all around me is familiar.

My head hurts. It’s cold. Freezing cold. Dammit, it’s here. I’m down.

Ferocious unease and anxiety well up from the depths of my chest. The urge to throw up comes with them.

All of a sudden, I’m scared of everything in the world. The higher I fly, the bigger this reaction is. I feel like the Gandor fellas are gonna open that door any minute and barge in here to kill me.

I feel like there’s a sniper rifle trained on me, right between the eyes.

Maybe there’s a hitman under this bed.

Or maybe everybody except me is dead already. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard a sound for a while now. Why? Maybe Martians invaded while I was high and slaughtered everybody.

The rotten Gandor brothers aren’t out there dancing with octopus monsters right now, are they? Or maybe they’re discussing how to off me?

I bet the Gandors are gonna shoot me and boil me and burn me and roll me up and sink me, and then on the bottom of the ocean those octopus Martians are gonna torture me and kill me and violate me and eat me and bleach me— No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no-nohoh-nooOOOOOooooo!

Calm down, man! You’re hallucinating; this isn’t real. You know that. But why am I so scared, when I know that? Maybe it’s not a hallucination or a delusion, maybe it’s real, maybe there’s really something behind that door— Stop! Don’t think! If you think, you’re finished! You lose! You’ll die! Dammit, if I just had those drugs from a minute ago! One more time, if I took those one more time, I bet I wouldn’t come down that time! Drugs, gimme drugs! Somebody’s gotta go deal with the Runorata pushers directly and get me drugs, or Iiiiiiiiii, AAaaaaaAAAh, I’ll die, this is really gonna kill me, hey, save me, somebody, help me, hey, Edith, Ediiiiiith…

Seven hours later, in his bathroom, Roy finally managed to calm down.

He’d stripped naked, and he stood dazed on a floor that was smeared with his vomit. He’d anticipated situations like this and had rented an apartment with a bathroom on purpose. He was really grateful to himself for having made it to that bathroom while he still had some sense left.

On the one hand, this had been his first time taking that kind, so the down hadn’t been as bad; on the other, since he regularly took other drugs, he’d probably had a weird reaction. Either way, the things he’d done before now had bounced back up and hit him. From a medical perspective, there might be aftereffects, but after all, it was a new type of drug. Roy didn’t know any of the details. All he understood was the tremendous excitement from the instant he’d taken it, and the terror of the down he’d just come through.

He wanted to apologize to Edith. He’d managed to last through the panic on the strength of that one intense thought. The weakness of will it took to succumb to seeking temporary highs and the determination to make it through the subsequent fear: Roy was a member of the odd breed that possessed this strange combination of mental strengths.

As he cleaned himself and the bathroom, he even felt a slight sense of achievement. Now, this time for sure, he’d be able to keep his promise to Edith. He had the feeling something like this had happened before, but that was probably just his imagination.

Pulling shorts and a shirt onto his now-clean body, Roy headed for the living room, humming. I gotta say, though, I hurt all over. Did I get in a fight while I was high or something? Is it some kind of bad effect from the drug?

Abruptly, he stopped in his tracks.

What’s that bag?

A bag he’d never seen before lay under the table. It was a big leather satchel, and it bulged as if it was stuffed full of something.

He’d seen it somewhere before, but he couldn’t remember where. He actually got the feeling he couldn’t afford to remember where.

The terror he’d thought had subsided returned. Instead of his brain, his heart started to jump loudly.

Fearfully, he went closer, opened the bag, and—

As he remembered everything, Roy’s heart very nearly stopped from the shock.

The bag was stuffed to bursting with white packets of powder.

It was the new drug the Runorata Family was spreading around, the stuff he’d just been in thrall to.

Slowly, the Grim Reaper that lived inside him began to swing its great scythe down.