Manic (I omitted a letter. Can I do that?)

It's long and late and full of errors, but here it is:

We were all sitting in the living room debating why the brownies tasted funny—me, Jon, Sarah, and the neighbor Sam—when Eiden called to ask if she could come over after work. I said yes and then asked Jon if I could put their bottles of alcohol in his room for a bit. I had just finished burying them under a pile of his clothes when Eiden knocked on the door.

“Hi!” I said. I sat down and patted the couch next to me, so she’d sit. I could tell she was off, so I began to talk quietly about nothing, hoping she wouldn’t betray herself to the normal people having a normal conversation sitting on the other couch. I pointed to the piece of gum on the coffee table that Eiden had given me earlier that day.

“I still have a whole piece left cause you gave me two, and I only eat half a piece at a time.” Eiden eats at least two pieces at a time. I think she’s addicted to gum.

“Can I have a drink?” Eiden asked.

I looked into her liquid brown eyes. “You mean like water?”

“No,” she laughed, but it was not a funny laugh. “Something with alcohol.”

“No,” I said, “Why do you want alcohol?”

“Just to relax.”

“You’re an alcoholic.”

“I’m better now. Don’t worry! I’m not going to get crazy.” But she already was.

“Did you drink before you came here?”

“No,”

“Did you take anything?”

“No.” Maybe she was drugged by someone at work, I thought. I brought her downstairs to my bedroom so I could get to bottom of it.

“How do you know you’re better?” I asked in a soothing tone.

“Because. I remembered all my rapes.”

“Well, that’s probably why you want to drink,” I said. “So you can forget them again.”

Eiden just stared. I asked if she wanted to write it down, or talk about it, but she just kept going farther away from me, alternating between staring at nothing and laughing hysterically. Her laughter seemed sharp, with jagged edges, like the pieces of glass I sometimes pick up on the side of the road.

I had to say her name about five times in a row before she would answer, “What?”

“Do you remember what your mom did to you?”

“Yeah, she did lots of bad things.” I had never seen Eiden so assured. Usually she thought that she had made it up because she had taken so many drugs. I thought it was PTSD keeping her from acknowledging the truth. But here she was, believing herself when she was at her most insane. So I asked Jon if I could borrow his car to drive her home.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” I asked as we passed the exit that would go to the downtown ER.

“No, I’m fine,” She gave me a smile that was supposed to look normal. I played a scenario in my head in which I took her to the ER forcibly and decided against it. I remembered the look on her mother’s face the day I had dropped her off. It’s the look you see in horror movies on the killer’s face when he reveals himself. The point where he stops acting like a normal person and you see the switch happen in his eyes. It happens in nightmares, too.

Eiden and I would have been in the same cell of the asylum if we were in Sweeney Todd; we’re both redheads.

The forecast predicted snow, even though it was April, but what fell from the sky while I drove was not snow, it was a heavy, wet slush. It gathered on the side of the windshield where the wiper stopped, and formed frozen patterns.

The light was on at Eiden’s house. I wished it wasn’t. “What are you gonna do?” I asked.

“Oh I’m just going to go to bed,” Eiden assured me. It was just after nine. I knew that Eiden hadn’t been sleeping well lately—she was not going to bed.

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

The first part of Eiden’s reply was unintelligible, but it ended with, “Thank you.” She looked at me like I had just offered to give my life in exchange for hers. But as she got out of the car and quickly walked to the door of her house, it became clear she had refused the offer. I was relieved. I had already played the fight between myself and her mother out in my head and it had accomplished nothing but getting Eiden in trouble.

I stopped at the same gas station where Eiden had bought me a cookie and a Diet

Pepsi earlier that day. I used the bathroom first. There was a machine that dispensed about five different sexual accessories. I analyzed my stomach in the mirror and decided it wasn’t too huge, but not too small either. Someone tried to open the locked door so I said, “Just a minute,” as I took a picture of my stomach in the mirror with my phone. I wondered whether whoever was out there could hear the fake shutter noise and what they would imagine I was taking a picture of in the bathroom full of sexual accessories. I opened the door to find an unhappy looking woman with an awful haircut from the eighties and a pastel sweater also from the eighties. She was about my mother’s age, and up close behind the door so she could get in right away. Her male companion leaned against the wall and stared at me.

It was a good day to get a 44 oz fountain drink. Diet Dr Pepper. That was the first diet coke I ever tried, the one that started it all. I watched the foam begin to build and then breakdown immediately because it was fake. The edges of it turned brown and withered instead of piling up softly like real foam.

On the drive back, I thought maybe somewhere inside me someone was crying for Eiden and my mother’s schizophrenic friend Max. I drove him an hour one night to his mother’s house because he was panicking. My mother couldn’t do it because she had to get back to the psych ward that night, though she acted quite motherly as she soothed him. Max’s mother greeted us monotonously, overweight with no pants on.

Max died of AIDS. His stepdad had messed him up. I was mostly happy for him when he died.

The car radio sang about making love in the club and I sang along. “On the couch, on the table, on the bar or on the floor…” I could see the sticky dance floor littered with broken glass. The girl was on bottom, being pushed into the mess that would stick to her most private parts for a long time.

Some of the lyrics would not leave me alone. “I know you scared baby…” and the crooning, “I don’t care who’s watchin, watchin…” Usher sang it like a love song. Is it a love song? I wondered. Maybe he called it making love so it could play on the radio. I never understood why they won’t play swear words on the radio when they play things like, “I hope you don’t mind—I told him how you like it from behind…”

The music was nice, though. Usually I just ignore the Warning! sirens that go off every time someone describes body parts or certain acts. Like a bad smell that your nose gets used to after awhile because it never goes away. Life is a house that smells bad, I thought, and the only way to get rid of the smell is to leave the house. But you can’t leave the house, because that’s where the little children are and you have to be there for them. Everyone else just seemed to be so much more used to the smell than I was, immune to whatever poison filled the air. Not me. I didn’t have whatever mechanism is necessary to live in this atmosphere, to filter the air correctly, taking in the good and exhaling the bad. All I knew how to do was breathe in everyone else’s dirty exhalations.