When Lethe returned to the Backpacker’s Inn, Louie was sitting in the lounge area, talking to the bartender. They were sharing a couple laughs. Louie turned on the barstool with the top buttons of his Hawaiian shirt open and his blond, suntanned chest showing. His gut came out and jiggled when he laughed, and it appeared as if he was on friendly terms with the bartender.

Upon seeing Lethe, Louie excused himself from the bar. He popped up from the stool and waddled out to the pool deck, his drink spilling over the sides. An aura of dazed amusement surrounded him, a private merriment.

“So, did you get the stuff?” Louie asked.

“Yes, I got it,” Lethe sighed.

“Don’t say anything here. Let’s go to my room.”

Louie’s room was on the third floor. They took the stairs because the elevator wasn’t working. Tracy was hovering around the out-of-service elevator, assuming a pose of vigilance and responsibility. “Not to worry,” he said with a stutter. “I spoke to the elevator company. Somebody’s coming early tomorrow morning.” Louie brushed past the janitor, barely acknowledging his presence. Lethe smiled half-heartedly.

They climbed three flights of stairs and Louie panted as he pressed his hands onto his thighs. He appeared a bit drunk, climbing in zigzag, wobbling to and fro.

The room had the cloying scent of orange pekoe and the makeshift blinds were closed. Once Louie turned on the lights, Lethe noticed a Chinese woman on the bottom bunk, robed in a heavy, decorative fabric, with her face down into the mattress. Apparently she was sleeping but she looked dead.

“Don’t mind her. We’re sharing a room,” Louie uttered in the shadows.

Then he went to his suitcase in the corner of the room and removed a small glass pipe.

Depending on the reader’s background, “pipe” might evoke a number of colorful associations. The pipe that Louie removed from his suitcase was not the antique tobacco pipe that your grandfather may have cherished. Nor did it resemble the psychedelic smoking utensil you or your friends used in college. Rather this pipe was closer in relation to something you would find in a foul alleyway, beside a trash can. Essentially it was a piece of broken glass with sharp ridges and blackened on the ends.

“Are we going to smoke right in front of her?” Lethe asked.

“She’s asleep-”

“What if she wakes up?”

“I smoke in here all the time; she’s never said anything before.”

“This woman lets you smoke crack in her room?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think she speaks English-”

Lethe groped inside his pockets for the stash that Mammon sold him. Mammon seemed like a character in a dream, a formidable, nightmarish high priest, who could instill fear in Lethe even after Lethe had fled from his house.

Once Louie saw the crack, his cheeks spread apart, revealing his prominent rabbit-teeth.

“Who sold this to you?”

“A man.”

“What kind of man?”

“A man I met on the street. Near the bus stop like you said.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?”

Louie paused and dipped his finger inside the Saran Wrap.

“It just looks too damn pure for you to have found it by the bus stop.”

Louie rubbed the rocks between his fingers, as if testing their caliber. His bottom lip quivered as he dropped a couple morsels on top of his pipe.

“I need you to hold the lighter for me.” He said. “Make sure the flame is directly on the rock.”

The glass filled with whorls of chalky smoke, giving off the ammonia smell of chemicals. Louie’s face turned from pale-white to crimson-flame.

Holding the pipe away from his face, the veteran crack-smoker expanded his cheeks until purple veins grew out his forehead. And then, unable to hold it any longer, he spewed the smoke from his nostrils and lowered his eyes, receding into a remote corner behind his lids.

He revived spontaneously as if performing a magic trick. “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

Lethe poised his lips to the glass pipe. My turn, he thought. I guess I’m ready to smoke crack. I’m ready to burn up my freedom and suck it out of this glass tube. Remember that field trip to the Robert Crown Health Center in the fifth grade. Crack is the dirtiest of drugs. They said crack can obliterate your mind, and Louie seems to agree. Just one hit, Louie says, will get me high. I’m not thinking about my mother right now, although I bet she’s resting in her arm chair as I’m taking this hit, I bet she’s watching reruns of All in the Family with her nurse. I’m not thinking about my father though I can see him rushing down a white hallway in a city hospital, and later at a cocktail party with big-name surgeons. I’m not thinking about my little sister either, poor little Mazzy, who is getting drunk at some high school party, about to sleep with her best friend.

Then the lighter kicked out its flame.

“Suck,” Louie said.

“Suck harder.”

Lethe could feel a cool column of smoke orbiting his lungs. A ripple of bliss ran through every tingling nerve in his body and he felt as though he were temporarily suspended above ground, or perhaps not even there at all.

“Did you get it?” Louie asked.

“I think so.”

“How does it feel?”

Lethe looked around the room. The Chinese lady was still sleeping. “It feels like my brain is numb.”

“Good that’s how it’s supposed to feel.”

(Table of Contents)