text: The phone vibrates in Brian’s lap and, taking his hand off the wheel, he reaches for it only to knock it unceremoniously between the center console and the driver’s seat, where he sat in the late model gold Toyota on his way to pick up his roommate from work. “Fuck my life,” Brian mumbles under his breath, wiping the cold snot lining his nostrils across the arm of the long-sleeved shirt he’s been wearing for the past three days. Actually, who can count? He may well have been wearing it the whole week. He reaches down to the power cord plugged into the cigarette lighter, wanting to fish the slippery phone out from no-hands’ land and, attempting to stifle a sneeze, pulls the plug right out from the back of the phone which falls back into the abyss with a taunting “cli-clack”. The decoupling causes a sudden give in the taught cable and sends him into a rage. He pulls the plug out of the dash and proceeds to whip himself on his bare calf with the cable. “Awrrghhh,” he whines, rearing back with the cable to strike himself again. “Yea, take it bitch,” he commands of himself, a slight smile appearing just above what might have been a five o’clock shadow at five o’clock some four days ago. “It hurts so good, doesn’t it? You fucking weirdo.” His legs, previous poster-children of restless leg syndrome, temporarily stop their rapid shaking as he rubs the red strip slowly rising up in his pale skin. He grabs some of the ginger hair that keeps his legs from being mistaken for exsanguinated corpse flesh and twists it hard one time before rearing back with the green USB cable. He bears down with the cable again, harder this time and lets out a yelp, seemingly of pain, but the look on his face, that silly crooked smile of someone who is truly losing it, says otherwise. The hierarchy of pain is an odd thing, but Brian has learned to take advantage of it during these times of withdrawal. “Moments ago I hurt everywhere. Now I just hurt right here,” he thinks to himself, rubbing the red strip of raised flesh, trying to convince himself that he’s not some masochistic lunatic. These symptoms happen whenever Brian goes more than 24 hours without his almighty cure-all, his heroine: heroin. He’s already spent all the money that he so slickly conned out of his aunt on his insatiable habit and is now rushing to pick up his roommate, the wonderful Sandra, who very well may want to send him on a sketchy mission to procure more of the holy substance. She would undoubtedly share with him, just as he had with her. To be quite honest though, she’s carried much more of the burden in this relationship than he. This fact makes him want to escape from the reality of it all the more. He hits the cruise control, pulls forward on the seat belt and, like a contortionist, reaches his hand around the back of and underneath the driver’s seat, retrieving the elusive phone with his finger tips. He pulls it into view, corrects the course of the vehicle with his knee on the wheel, narrowly missing the back end of an 18-wheeler, and reads the offending message from Sandra: “I’ve got an emergency faculty meeting and won’t need you to pick me up for at least another hour. Why don't you go pick up new points at the pharmacy? We’ll get well after I get off.” “Son of a bitch,” Brian whines, thinking about the eternity that another hour of this torture will feel like. He thinks about the difficulty of picking up new insulin syringes, what Sandra referred to as “points.” This requires him to walk up to the pharmacy counter and act like a straight, up-standing citizen who suffers from diabetes, a simple enough task under normal circumstances, but far more difficult when sweating profusely and actively experiencing the paradoxical relief of the inflicted pain of USB cables and mini-Indian burns. Brian would very much like both to “get off” and to “get well,” however, so he plugs “Walgreen's” into the phone to receive GPS directions to the nearest one. There is one just two blocks further down from where he was heading already, passed Sandra’s work. He starts taking deeper breathes, trying to calm down, and takes some Axe body spray out of the center console. He sprays himself across the chest and under his arms, hoping that the clean smell will deter any upstanding citizen from seeing the truth of his deplorable circumstances. The sudden smell tickles his nose and sends him into another sneezing spell. To sneeze eight times in a row and not crash the car is no small feat, but his pride is short-lived as a cramping pain in his bowels causes him to almost double over in his seat. A sound like a bubbling oil pool emanates from and rumbles his whole torso. He scantly wishes for death, an end to all this needless, self-induced suffering. He slams on the brakes, noticing the light ahead is red, but he slides too far into the intersection. He sees the flash of the red light cameras snapping a picture of the license plate. “God dammit! Sandra is going to kill me,” Brian said aloud. The car he’s driving is Sandra’s and she would be responsible for that ticket. He has already got her a ticket once before. “I am the worst friend ever. I really think people would be better off if I were dead.” The light turns green and Brian pulls forward and into the Walgreen's. He gets out of the car and into the store, walking towards the pharmacy. He tries to go into the men’s room but the door is locked. He bumps into a lanky man of about six feet with a large black trench coat on in spite of the extreme heat outside. He shoves Brian a little bit forward, saying “Watch it, ass hole.” Brian, needing more than anything to empty his bowels, calls out “Sorry,” as he passes by him en-route to the counter waving a hand up in apology without looking back. He asks the pharmacist quickly for the keys to the bathroom, trying not to look as desperate as he truly was. The long-haired Indian woman with a ruby bindi in her third-eye smiles and reaches into her lab coat pocket and shifts around inside. She pulls out the keys and slides them jingling across the counter toward Brian’s outstretched, grateful hands. He thanks her and quickly makes his way into the restroom. He has no time to be concerned with putting the sanitary covers over the seat and, only slightly grossed out, drops his trousers and sits immediately on the unsuspecting toilet. He lets out a small wail of simultaneous pain and relief in accompaniment to the sound of a bucket splashing into a lake which emanates up from between and beneath his legs. He sits there, almost out of breath, but feeling very relieved. He hears two loud banging noises through the bathroom door. “Someone’s shitty car must be back-firing in the parking lot,” he thinks to himself. He takes another few minutes on the commode to ensure the anal onslaught is over, and satisfied that it is, cleans himself up, washes his hands and face in the sink and dries up in the ridiculous blower attached to the wall, its jet engine drowning everything out, and echoing all over the tile bathroom. He turns back to find where he set the keys to the bathroom and heads out to the pharmacy counter, ready at last to try and social engineer his way to some new points. He opens the door and makes his way to the counter. “Holy shit,” Brian thinks to himself as he notices the cash register lying on its side at the foot of the counter. Bottles lay all around it and a large metal cabinet, usually locked until the pharmacist accesses its contents, lays open at a 45 degree angle tipped over the counter. He looks around but there is not a single worker in sight. He rushes over and notices that all the bottles strewn across the counter and floor are controlled substances: narcotics! “Holy shit! Don’t mind if I do,” he says to himself, grabbing a shopping bag and filling it with all of the bottles he could grab. Oxycontin, roxicodone, meperidine, demerol, dilaudid, morphine, methadone, some fentanyl transdermal patches, and a few other things that even his street pharmacist brain had never heard of were all thrown in the bag. Just when he was finishing up looting all the bottles on his side of counter, he leans over to see if he missed anything. On the floor just on the other side lay the long-haired Indian pharmacist, breathing shallowly and holding a wound on her neck, blood pouring out between her fingers. Brian immediately loops the pharmacopoeia over his sweaty, bony shoulders and jumps over the counter, grabs a spare lab coat hanging nearby and rushes to the pharmacist, immediately applying pressure with the coat. It quickly soaks through with the blood spewing from her neck. Her eyes look glossy and are wide with terror as she squeezes on Brian’s bicep as though she believes that if she could just hold on to this sickly junkie, the rushing darkness would not overcome her. All would be well and she could be tricked by Brian into selling him the works he came for. Brian quickly ascertains that this poor woman is lost to the world. Should he hold on with her till the bitter end, or should he break away with enough drugs to sate his thirst for at least a month? As he makes his decision a rookie police officer rushes into the pharmacy, his Glock 9mm pistol drawn. He sees the woman bleeding out, clutching at Brian’s arm, as he lurks over her, holding her neck with a bag full of stolen drugs slung over his shoulder. He fires a single shot straight into the back of Brian’s head. Brian’s face explodes into the Indian pharmacist’s dead eyes, her bindi lost in the dots of scarlet spraying her face. “Police!” shouts the rookie officer.