He overdosed.
Sick and addicted, he vomits into a bag. Disappearing down alleys stamped with dark rings of black water and long shadows like needles infecting the rotten souls of an ancient city.
Loved ones pouring out every drop of sympathy for his intrepid and meaningless life. Shooting junk and hunting for more until every penny goes into his veins. He seeks salvation from every relic of his past.
Hovering over a bucket. Struggling to keep his stomach. He’s ripe and unwashed and he sobers in the predawn pacific frost.
The jagged blue mountains, his cold little pillow.
He ventures east to spokane like some whiskeysoaked wanderer crossing the vast purple plains sipping and sleeping beneath the constellations on crumbled black soil.
He follows torn maps to encampments and raids the tents like some drunken beast of the night. He washes himself in gutterwater under a pale gibbous moon and the starspangled sky.
He sobers in a toiletstall feverdreaming of memories that never existed, promises he’ll never keep. A philosophical drunk barcrawling for treasure up the rainblown minefield toward his next hangover.
* * *
Few months he is in portland, san francisco.
He returns to the emerald city on a tattooed train that awakens at dawn across a grim blue skyline.
He steals vodka and drinks it all and slurs songs of triumph while wandering the fractured traintracks.
He sleeps in a shared room with the other lost souls of belltown and comes alive at night like some inebriated nightmare.
He is skinny and his joints ache from travel and his dark eyes avoid everything.
Shooting up with men and women of all colors, all creeds, young and old and rich and poor but mostly he is shooting up by himself.
Women with voices barbed with a native twang and trailerpark nasalness. Travelers from lands so far and unique that robbing them at the hostel while they’re passed out drunk makes he himself feel anointed.
And on a brutal winter night he is stabbed with a broken bottle and falls against the dead plants and crawls to safety.
Nobody helps.
By the time he’s sober he’s broke and he departs in the dark of dawn and stays unrested on a bed of slanted floorboards until he finds something better to sleep on.
* * *
Family tree rotted with addiction.
Never again in all their infighting will there be resentment as hateful as this.
He sobers on the street, a bully among beggars.
Watching the emerald river thrash. Crows croaking from the sidewalk, black as nails against the concrete. Rafts of dabbling ducks surfing the graywhite swells.
He wanders through the veins of a vacant city where the air smells of shit and perfume.
At night the dealers hiss at him like demonic soothsayers and within a month he’s using.
Needles in the sharps container.
Walking down dirt roads with his trembling fist clenched in the pockets of his pair of stolen jeans.
He hitchhikes north through towns and time zones, taking bottles and wallets with him. He avoids the lightrail for fear of arrest.
The winos grunt in the fog and misfortune finds him in a derelict cathedral where he retreats to hide from the law. An amputated pastor prays beside him and together they wait for salvation.
The sun that rises is a red pinhole burning though the ashen sky.
***
His sickness leads him for days.
He wears soiled trousers that have holes in the pockets and scribbles in the linings and he feels like one of the drunks he’d roll at the hostel while soulsearching the north pacific.
His pain worsens beneath a severed white birch and a scarred red maple and the rotten seeds inside him stay planted like a burning curse and a harsh wind rustles the leaves.
He works as a dishwasher and asks as payment for food and a cot, and on that cot during the fall of twenty-twentythree he rises for chasing highs in the city of Seattle.
