Like a Balloon
by Jace Einfeldt
It’s the middle of a hot afternoon and your head hurts bad, and you need money and you need it bad like right now because if you don’t get the money now you’ll be in bad shape with your dealer Popeye who you met in rehab the third time who had a red beard down to his chest and said he’d been abducted by aliens and who introduced you to meditation and said that it could clear your mind only it never, ever did even when you sat on the ground with your eyes clamped shut. Popeye served in Afghanistan just like you so that’s why you became friends at first and he also sold you fifty 80-mg tablets of oxy on the presumption that you would have the money to pay him by the end of the week.
And now that it is the end of the week Popeye said if you didn’t get the money to him ASAP, you’ll be dead. You grab your pistol from your safety box and hold it like a sleeping rottweiler. You stroke it hoping to coax the thing into telling you how you can score 2Ks before Popeye comes.
You slump in your sagging, stained, tan corduroy armchair in your apartment.
You’ve lost all your money, everything, and this time it wasn’t even your fault even though it feels like it is. And everyone including Jeannie says you are a lying, cheating sack of shit and you hadn’t really been rehabilitated or at least hadn’t taken rehab seriously because rehab is supposed to fix everything and make everything back to normal, good as new and all that.
But you’re sure as hell not rehabilitated because people who are rehabilitated don’t use heroin or oxycodone because they’re supposed to be conditioned against it like those dogs that salivate at the ring of a bell or like how you were trained to kill except you were supposed to get a sick, queasy feeling if you even thought about shooting. But all that happened in rehab was you couldn’t ever get to sleep, and you sweated like hell. Rehab didn’t fix anything.
Jeannie visited you in rehab the first time with Bonnie Jo, your daughter, but after the second, third, and especially the fourth time she said that she couldn’t do this anymore and packed up and left.
She left no address, nothing. She’d always been there especially when your parents stopped believing that what you were going through was a result of the war and believed you trying to off yourself was just you trying to get attention. And even if you were trying to get their attention, they were just too goddamn busy pouring all their time into your obviously more responsible twin brother Nick, who got into college with a full-tuition scholarship to study mechanical engineering instead of taking the easy way and joining the Marines, and by God Nick was going to work for NASA and send someone maybe a monkey to Mars someday.
Now that Jeannie, Bonnie Jo, and the money are gone, all you have is a headful of nightmares, a two-grand debt, and the cold, black barrel of a pistol cupped in your hands.
You rub your pulsing temples, press play on the CD player on the bookshelf to your left, let the operatic melody of “Ave Maria” fill every crevice of your body and apartment, keep your eyes shut. Any second, Popeye will break down the door with murder in his eyes, but you turned the armchair to face the front door so if Popeye kicks it down, all it would take would be a quick succession of pop-pop-pops. Popeye’d be dead and you’d be debt free.
But Popeye doesn’t come. It’s already dark. Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he’s biding his time, waiting for when you least expect it. You would have been almost a little disappointed if he didn’t show, but the tick-tocking of the minute hand on the secondhand Coca-Cola clock on the opposite wall hammers against your skull so hard you think you hear cracks like wishbones twisting, bending, and snapping through your ear canals.
You shake your head and lift the gun to your mouth praying that pulling the trigger will clear things up, start it all over. You tip your head back and count backwards from ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one, breath in, and click—
You don’t know what comes next. Maybe you’ll hear a pop and see a flash of light like how it goes in the movies when someone dies or maybe you’ll immediately come back as a dog or a salamander or a snake. In the darkness behind your eyelids, you wait for a nirvanic ecstasy to erase you.
You might see a cool blue dusk like the one when you and Jeannie lied down in an open sleeping bag waiting for the meteor shower of a lifetime.
“This shit’s gonna blow your mind,” you told her.
And she grabbed your hand and held it tight like you’d float away like a balloon.
Your surroundings might turn a rose pink like Bonnie Jo’s cheeks after you sledded down the hill behind the Rec Center the winter after you got home from Wardak the first time when she was two, and she said I love you when you didn’t feel you deserved it.
Maybe everything would bleed into a sunburst before some familiar hand reaches out and pulls you by the collar into some conduit where everything goes white.
But everything is still.
Untethered.
Weightless.
Numb.
A tick.
A tock.
A knock.
You’ll probably float like in a pool only there won’t be any water.
Jace Einfeldt is a native of Southern Utah and currently lives in Central New York with his wife. His work appears and is forthcoming in CutBank, The Nervous Breakdown, Rabid Oak, and elsewhere.
