A story that floats by, into the sun.

Kelsey sent me an email from Saint Louis, said did I want to come out there and do drugs.  She didn’t mention what the drugs were, just did I want to come out there and visit her and, by the way, there were some drugs.  It was fine and I could stay with her.  And the implication was we could do the drugs together.  Coming from Kelsey, that was just about a protestation of love.

But I didn’t want to do some drugs.  I also didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  I would’ve liked to have stayed with Kelsey for a couple months, fuck a lot, get up late, eat fancy breakfasts, and pretend we’re Seriously Involved With Each Other the way we’d done once or twice in the past.  But drugs made me nervous.  She didn’t say weed.  She didn’t say smoking in the oblique stoner way that meant mellow days and hazy good times.  She came straight out with it: There’s some drugs.  It’s fine.  Fine is the worst word in the English language.  Fine means trouble and misery.  It means bad shit.  Whenever there’s some drugs, it’s always fine.

She was staying with Grant, who I knew from Kansas City, and Denise, who I didn’t know, but who I’d heard of.  And I can say that both of them were fine.  So fine I might go far out of my way to ensure that I never encountered them in a house or on the street or in a bar or in the office of an attorney, all of which nearly happened back in KC but didn’t.  Not ever doing some drugs with them ensured that it wouldn’t.

But part of me might have still been in love with Kelsey.  Or, if not in love, then in a feverish kind of lust and affection that made me overlook things like her history of minor offenses and her ODing in my bathtub three summers ago and trashing the place because I said she couldn’t have a cat.

“What’ll you feed it,” I asked.

“I’ll feed it whatever.”

“No,” I said, “you’ll give it cheese puffs and then forget all about it and it’ll die or it’ll try to eat your ear off in your sleep.  And then I’ll have to kill it because it’ll have become a menace.  And once I kill it for your own protection, you’ll blame me.  And this’ll come up again in like a year and I’ll never hear the end of it.  So no.  You don’t get a cat.  Do you want a burrito?”

“No, I want a cat.”

“You don’t get one.  You may have a burrito.”

“Fuck your burrito.”

Then she proceeded to break all our windows, screaming about how she wanted a cat and fuck my burrito.

I could overlook all those episodes with Kelsey, all those fine moments, like when she tried to turn a party of horny Air Force helicopter pilots against me by flirting with each one of them because I had a cold and wanted to go home.  She didn’t want to go home because there was a lot of booze in the Air Force’s kitchen and, at the time, we didn’t have any in ours.  So many fine moments that almost ended in a fistfight or a car wreck or jail.  But still, still.  We all have those people who affect us like some drugs, and Kelsey had that effect on me.

So she was out in Saint Louis and there were the drugs and Grant and Denise and it was all just fine.  Kelsey thought I knew something about something.  She thought I could come back into her life and say this is good; that’s not; do this; don’t do that and everything would work out.  Like I exuded the gravity of a small moon.  It wasn’t much, but it could keep her from floating by, into the sun.

I bought a train ticket from Hauberk, Missouri, to Saint Louis’ Gateway Station.  I could have driven to Saint Louis in about three hours, but Grant and Denise were in my thoughts.  I wouldn’t have trusted either of them with a rusty bicycle, much less my ancient Dodge Dart.  My neighbor had a shed.  So I paid him $50 to keep the car locked up in there for a week and we shook on it.

Kelsey would eventually tell me Grant and Denise were deep into ketamine instead of oxy, if that makes a difference, like saying so-and-so is a Lutheran instead of a Catholic.  Different culture, different furnishings, same facial expressions, same doom loop.  Addicts, like expert oenologists or bespoke flügelhorn valve artisans, will disagree that it’s all the same.  They’ll see a world of differences between certain wines or horn valves.  But I’d been clean since the bathtub incident three years ago.  That was three years of meetings and calling my sponsor twice a week.  I didn’t want to think about one drug versus another.  I found myself thinking about it anyway.

In Grant and Denise’s case, and maybe Kelsey’s too,  I’d have guessed oxy or DMT or even old-school valium, because coke was definitely out of their pay grade.  But it didn’t matter.  They’d chosen ketamine.  They looked completely out of it when I arrived.  And I knew they wouldn’t not be out of it anytime soon.

I was sitting on the sofa, drinking a cup of instant coffee with Kelsey and Byron, who had a guitar instead of a shirt and gave off the powerful vibe of a person who sells some drugs, when Byron’s boyfriend, Petey, walked in wearing a yellow WWI gas mask and nothing else.  Grant and Denise were on the other sofa, sleeping again.  Byron strummed the same chord over and over.   Kelsey had her head on my shoulder and I thought she might also be asleep.

Petey had no body hair.  He presented himself in the middle of the living room.

“Nice,” I said.  “What are you, naked apocalypse guy?”

“Is it nice?”  Petey’s voice sounded tiny and flat from inside the gas mask.

“It’s nice,” said Byron.  “So nice.”  He strummed his chord.

Petey did some body builder poses.  He was skinny and had the rubbery look of someone who assiduously waxes and moisturizes, all sharp angles, smooth planes, veins, and stringy muscles.

Then Denise sat up.  She coughed, worked her tongue around her mouth because she’d been sleeping with it open, and gave Petey a look.  “Do us a favor and put on some pants, okay?  I don’t want to see that.”

“This?”  Petey thrust his hips at her.

“Yeah.”

“Why not?  You racist?”

I thought Denise was going to overcome the pill-head stereotype and physically throw Petey out the door.  She was a big woman, pretty and Midwestern-solid in spite of the T-shirt, sweats, and tangled hair.  She looked like once, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, she might have had her life together.  Maybe before she hooked up with Grant in KC.

“Don’t say dumb shit in my living room.”

“I’m Portuguese.  You can’t handle that?”

“Get going, Petey.”

He looked at her through the gas mask, then padded down the hallway and slammed the bathroom door.

“Can you get him out of here?” she asked Byron.

He stood up and nodded, slung the guitar across his back.  “Namaste,” he said.

I spent that first night far from any lust and affection or even conversation.  Kelsey said three words to me before she passed out: “Shit, you came.”  She’d gotten so high before I arrived that the sense of her as a human being was totally absent.  Her body was now a hollow thing, mind and soul elsewhere.  I carried her to bed.  Then I lay down next to her, listening to her breathe, looking at the tree-branch shadows on the wall.

The next day was better.  Kelsey’d sobered up and her usual wary look had returned.  She’s not telling me something, I thought.  Something’s messed up and she doesn’t want me to know.  Then I laughed.  Of course.  What did I expect?  Everything was fine.

Grant and Denise didn’t answer when I knocked softly on their bedroom door.  So Kelsey and I took the bus to the university to see Byron read his poems.  Byron had discovered a T-shirt and looked high and his poems were bad.  But everyone I knew seemed like they were high so often it had become an empty designation.  Byron frowned and said:

You are literally trembling.

I didn’t mean to be cruel.

That doesn’t mean you were kind.

Then he strummed his guitar a few times.  Nobody in the audience clapped or even moved.  It went on for 45 minutes.  There were a few professor types checking their phones, a few fidgety kids who might have been on a high school trip, and what were probably the students from Byron’s creative writing class—all sitting up front with shrewd, critical expressions.  Petey was sitting with them.  Without the gas mask, his shaved head gleamed.  When he looked back at us, I saw he had a bushy gray mustache.

Kelsey put her hand on my leg.  “This is killing me.”

“We can go.”  I put my hand over hers but she pulled away.

“No.  We have to be nice to Byron.”

I took a break to get a drink at the crusty water fountain in the hall.  The university auditorium was enormous but attendance was low.  I was surprised there were people milling around in the hallway outside.  But then I wasn’t.  They all looked the same: unnaturally thin, glassy, twitchy, like their train was about to leave the station but they didn’t have a ticket.  Ah yes, I thought.

Two girls leaned against the bulletin boards on either side of the hallway and stared at me without turning their heads.  The third, a guy farther down, was announcing board notices like it was his poetry reading, too: “University alterations.  A stitch in time saves nine.  Military discount.  Hey, a Navy recruiter’s gonna be here next week.  Do something with your life, son.  Human subject pool.  You can make twenty bucks.  Farmer’s market in Lot B.  Shit, vegetables.  They’re fresh.”

I got my drink of water and one of the girls came up to me.  She had a black mini-skirt, bright green rubber sandals, and a gray zip-up hoodie with a faded emblem of Garfield the Cat.  Her curly brown hair looked damp.

“Hey.”  She smiled.

I nodded.

“So you know Byron?”

“Who?”

“Byron.  You know.”  She looked at the auditorium door.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m just a poetry aficionado.”

“What?”

“I’m Professor Burke.  Edmund Burke.  At your service.”  I extended my hand and she tentatively shook it.  Hers was clammy and, for some reason, made me think of Florida.  This is how they shake in Florida, I thought.  People need to catch a train.  But first they need to find Byron.  They’re nervous.  They’re trying to join the Navy and get some vegetables.  Parts of their bodies that should be cool and dry are warm and moist.  Their hoodies don’t match their green rubber sandals.

“Oh my gosh!”  She smiled again.  “A professor!”  I caught a little contempt in the corners of her eyes, thought of her smiling like that while thrusting a broken beer bottle.  “We’re friends of Byron.  The poet.”

“Ah, the poet.”

“Can you introduce us?”

“I thought you were friends.”

Confused for a moment, smile fading, she looked back at the other girl, who was still watching with her eyes but hadn’t decided to turn her head.  The guy farther down the hall continued reading: “Therapeutic massage.  Psych 463.  Learn about emotions.  Mousetrap at the Wilson theater.  Bagels.”

“Bagels sound good right now,” I said.

“So can you introduce us?”

“I’m a professor.  My job is not to introduce.  My job is to profess.”

“What?”

I went back in but the reading was over.  Most of the people had filtered out.  Petey held an unlit cigarette while he gestured at a very tall man with a gray bowl cut.  Kelsey stood by the podium talking to Byron, her face an inch from his.

In order to avoid running into Byron’s customer base in the hall, I went out the side door by the stage and then through a maze of stairwells and windowless passages.  Just when I was beginning to despair, thinking I’d have to backtrack and confront Petey’s gleaming head, I emerged in the lower lot.  This is it, I thought.  This is the hero’s journey.  I’ve gone through the underworld.  I’ve faced the minotaur in the labyrinth and survived his shitty poetry.  I’ve spoken to the fates in their rubber slippers.  Now it’s time to make the voyage home.

I took the bus back to Grant and Denise’s.  It was good that I did, since Kelsey went somewhere that afternoon with Byron and didn’t come back.  A party.  But a party at Byron’s house was what?  The K-hole and naked Petey in his gas mask?  We have to be nice to Byron, she’d said.  Sure, sure, we’re friends of the poet.  I got it.  I knew that kind of nice.  I watched downtown Saint Louis pass and thought about when I used to live there.  The bus went down some streets where certain things had taken place in which I hadn’t presented my best self.

Grant answered the door in a narrow black suit and a jade bolo tie, his hair slicked back.  He looked like a small-town mortician from the 1940s.  He didn’t recognize me.  “Hey, we’re really not interested.”

“It’s me.”

A look of confusion crossed his face, then anxiety.  Denise came up behind him and whispered something in his ear.  Grant murmured okay, nodded.  He had a long face and a chiseled jaw, but years of abuse and crime had taken a toll.  Being drug-thin made his head look too big.  He had a habit of squinting and sucking in his cheeks, like he’d swallowed something bitter.  Grant got confused a lot.  A far cry from the old days when he ripped people off on real estate deals and drove a big gold-rimmed Escalade.  His crimes got smaller over time and his drugs got bigger.

Denise waved me in, pointed Grant to the bedroom.  He obeyed.

“You want a cup of tea?”

“Okay.”  I never drank tea.

She brought out two ceramic mugs of bright red tea that smelled like chemical roses.  When she smiled, I noticed the dull gold tooth on the left side of her mouth.

I wondered if she was married to Grant, but I didn’t think so.  That’s not how the scenario went.  What was the point?  Marriage says you can stay with someone through various circumstances, that your decisions are strong enough for something like that.  It says you won’t need to change your personality, have to leave your job, have to sleep in some other place with someone else, or have to listen to someone’s shitty poems.  Those are things you do when some drugs are making the choices.

“This town’s getting tedious.”  Denise sipped.  I felt like I should take a sip, too.  It tasted like sweet hot perfume.

“I’m thinking of making a change,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I got a friend down in Texas.  She needs a boyfriend.  You ever visit Texas?”

I said I hadn’t.  Then, “What about Grant?”

She smiled, took a long sip of the poison perfume.  “Who?”

Then she put down the mug and stood.  Denise had on a polyester rainbow muumuu straight out of the 70s.  She let it drop around her feet and stepped in front of me in nothing but her bra.

“You into vagina?”

“Sure.”  I felt like I was on automatic, like I was reaching the natural outcome of my visit and I didn’t have the willpower or options for anything else.  Denise’s thighs were enormous and pale. Her gut made a crease over her shaved pussy.

“Kelsey’s never gonna fuck you,” she said.  “She’s all dried up.”

“I think she’s with Byron.”

She grinned, leaned down, and kissed me on the lips.

The next morning, Kelsey still hadn’t returned.  Weeks later, I’d discover that Grant had decided to use up the last of his secret heroin and that he’d shuffled off to eternity in the middle of the night.  Or, pill-head gossip being what it was, maybe it happened the next night or a few nights after that.  Or didn’t happen at all.  When I heard about it, I remembered Grant answering the door dressed like a mortician with his hair slicked back and that jade bolo around his neck.  And I thought that’s how he probably wanted to go, dressed as well as he could manage, dressed to the nines or, in his case, to the fives.

I got to Gateway Station early and drank multiple cups of coffee before the train started boarding.  I had a powerful urge to get drunk, which, I knew, would lead to worse things.  Kelsey’d thrown me over for some drugs.  Denise threw Grant over for me and a road trip to Houston.  Moving to Texas might have actually been a good idea, but not with her.  The effort something like that would take seemed enormous.  As for me, I’d thrown all of them over after a two-day visit that was supposed to last a week.  I knew, deep in my heart, that my days with Kelsey were done.

The train moved through a rock-filled gully and came up into Missouri farmland.  I watched the landscape go by and tried not to think.  In my haste get out of there, I hadn’t showered and I could feel Denise on me.  I could still taste the rose-flavored tea.

The conductor came by and punched a hole in my ticket, looked at me for a moment, said, “Had a good time in the city, huh.”

“No.”  I said, “I went to a poetry reading.  I’m a friend of the poet.”

“Right-o.”

“Yes,” I said when he handed the ticket back, “Namaste.”