Blackfly Season

47

DAVID LETTERMAN HAD NEVER looked so evil. You couldn’t be sure if this was really Letterman or a pod-born version animated by the spirit of some creature fresh from hell. Wisps of smoke curled from the famous gap in the front teeth, and the ears seemed to be capped with tiny tongues of flame. It was hard to tell in the slats of daylight that seeped around the edges of the boarded-up windows.

“You look like you could use a drink, there, Kevin.” Letterman flashed his boyish grin, and twin plumes of smoke issued from his nostrils. “How about a shot of Cold Turkey?”

He pulled a bottle and two glasses from a drawer in his desk and flashed the label for the audience. There was laughter and a wry comment from the band leader, Paul What’s-His-Name, that Kevin couldn’t quite make out.

Letterman poured two shot glasses of whisky. He drank his down in one toss before throwing the glass over his shoulder.

Kevin knew it wasn’t real. The stink of this place was making the withdrawal symptoms worse—the smell of death and things rotting, the cauldron, those two sturdy hooks screwed into the beam above it. The buzzing of the blowflies. Sometimes Kevin was certain they were demons who had taken the form of flies, but most of the time he knew they were just flies.

The firmest reality was his own body. It is supremely difficult to doubt the messages of your own body. The sweats he could deal with. Sweat poured off him, stinging his eyes, and he knew—aside from the fact that he had thrown up more times than he could count—this accounted for the thirst that claimed the entire territory of his throat.

The shivers, too, were bearable. The chattering teeth, the quaking arms, the legs that trembled like horse flesh, even when he pressed them together to try to calm the shaking. He wept for heroin. Red Bear had had the presence of mind to pluck it from Kevin’s pocket before tying his hands behind his back and locking the door on him, and Kevin cried like a child now for heroin—not to ease the shaking, or the sweats, or the nausea—he could live with those. Kevin had no idea whether anybody else experienced it this way, but for him the prime symptom of his addiction was the ache in his chest. It came and went, but when it came it felt as if it would never leave again. This ferocious gnawing in his chest felt as if his lungs and blood vessels had been chewed away, leaving only his heart to beat out an eternal, abject longing.

“What about bone pain?” Letterman wanted to know. “How are you handling the bone pain, Kevin?”

Of the physical withdrawal symptoms, bone pain was the worst. It was as if iron rods had been inserted through the marrow of all the hundreds of bones in his body, from the tiniest hinges of fingers and toes to the beams of his spine and legs, chest and arms. And now some demon was banging on them with a hammer so that they hummed and howled like tuning forks.

Nothing helped. Not deep breathing, not trying to imagine beautiful things, not trying to concentrate on one object: that widest crack of light, for example, or that paint drip on the floor not more than a foot from his nose. Kevin was not so sure that brown stain was, in fact, paint. He didn’t want to know what it was.

“Say, what do you suppose that brown stain is on the floor there, Kevin?”

“I don’t know, Dave.”

“No, really. I’m just curious. It’s not blood, is it?”

“I don’t know, Dave.”

“Who do you suppose that came from? I thought Guthrie was killed someplace else.”

“I don’t know where he was killed, Dave.”

“I guess it could be Terri’s, then.”

“It’s not Terri’s. Terri went back to Vancouver.”

“Hard to say, really, without more to go on. Could be hers, could be Wombat’s. I mean, that is his head in the pot there, Kevin, so I don’t know—draw your own conclusions. Those are probably his fingers as well, I imagine. Say, Kevin, do you suppose you’re going to end up in there, too? Weren’t you supposed to be a poet at one point?”

Kevin lifted his face from the floor and tried to focus. It was hard with Letterman yammering at him, and the clatter in his bones, the sweat pouring into his eyes. He blinked hard several times and squinted. There was a tiny dark spot in the wall beneath the table, about six inches above the floor. The point of a nail.