Death had always watched her with hungry eyes, but when its jaws closed around her, it never seemed to be able to swallow her completely. She had died fully seven times, by violence and by ignorance, and never once had Death choked her down completely. When it spit her out this time, she was shivering in the bathtub, clothed only with sweat and vomit and pink-colored spittle. She woke up gasping for air.
The day before, she had been lying on the floor between two men smoking weed. “I don’t want to sound too dramatic but like, sometimes it feels like the whole world is one intricate torture machine designed for me specifically,” said a man who went by the name Prophet Motive. He was around her age, and was an underground hip-hop artist. He hit the pipe again before continuing: “Like God just forgot to hit my life with any special meaning or silver lining and just said ‘Fuck it, some people will suffer.’”
“I know what you mean,” said the man she called Hamid, who knew Prophet by the name Malik. He took the pipe and took a tiny puff. Every motion he made was deliberate and gentle, which she liked about him.
She liked to watch him cook, or pray, or watch television, or pet his cat. She had once convinced herself that she was in love with him, but had later convinced herself that she was incapable of loving anyone. She lay on the floor between the man who she called Profé and the man who she called Hamid. She was nobody, and so her name has been omitted from my recollection, but sometimes she felt as if she was made from light itself when Hamid smiled and called her ‘habibti’.
Prophet sniffed. Hamid had set his shoulder and stitched him up in the kitchen, but he still looked like he had only just been dragged from the street. His shirt was torn and there was blood in his socks, but before changing into the clothes Hamid had provided, he had sat and taken out his pipe, and after an hour he and Hamid were still deep in conversation.
“It’s like He has it out for me. Or someone does. The whole fucking—” he motioned to the window, to the world. “I don’t know. It feels like I haven’t even had a win in my life in months. Like human beings weren’t meant to live this way, you know?” Prophet said.
“I know,” said Hamid gently.
Prophet’s voice quivered like someone who was using all of their willpower to prevent themselves from sobbing. “We were…we are born to fucking pick berries and vibe and fuck and smoke good and hunt gazelle with sticks not this, this bullshit!” He wiped his eyes with his good hand.
She closed her eyes. She didn’t like watching people cry. It reminded her of the people who were immortalized in her nightmares, beseeching. She focused away from the sound of a grown man losing composure to the buzzing outside. Prophet called it “The Buzzard”. Hamid called it Zanana, the sound of the drone outside that flew over the city. The huge flying eyeball that watched everyone who stepped outside. Prophet had once said that with a camera that advanced we could be watching far-off planets and star systems, and instead we had flipped it upside-down to watch ourselves.
Hamid’s mother had brought him to America to escape American drones. He had grown up as a refugee, and, for better or for ill, had managed to slip through the cracks of the Citizenship Office’s sieve. By the time he had left medical school, the first advanced surveillance drones had already begun flying over American cities.
The zanana was ever-present, a fact of life in any city. It faded into the background for most people—it was just an externalization of their anxiety, the constant feeling of being watched. But it was more honest than anything else. A watch, a phone, a television would listen to your every word. The landlord had installed doors that only only unlocked if you watched an advertisement or paid a subscription, and had hidden cameras in every apartment. Every kiosk and lightpost and car could beam your face to a database that floated in the gulf and cross-compared it to every previous picture of you ever taken. But the drones made a noise that told you, ‘I can see you,’ and that was was comforting enough that people rarely complained about it.
But she had a particular psychological sensitivity to noises. She had a particular psychological sensitivity to the sound of electronics, and to the sounds of engines, and to the sounds of too many voices in one place. She had not been born for this world. As a poet had once said, she had been born to pick berries and to vibe and to fuck.
Hamid too had difficulty with the sound. It reminded him of childhood, and like every person who lived in their apartment block, and like every person who lived in the entire hab block in the industrial sector, he had not had a very good childhood. His was particularly traumatic regarding the sound of drones, and so sometimes they would hang towels over the window and push the mattress against the wall furthest from it and sleep huddled together, swaddled in blankets like they were sick, even in the summer when nights would be over a hundred degrees and by morning they would be stuck together with sweat.
She was always hungry, but rarely for food. She was hungry now, so hungry that it was worth the trouble it would buy her when Hamid would find her later in the bathtub. Or at least, it was worth it then. She excused herself to get a bite to eat. Hamid watched her grab her mask and her boots and her jacket, but he did not dare leave his friend and patient alone.
The hallway was trashed, as usual, but there was a certain satisfaction in seeing every smartdoor dark. Someone from Floor Three had figured out how to deactivate them and open them on command with an exploit in the software. The property manager would not be around to turn them back on until the end of the month when rent was due, and sending someone out was apparently more trouble than it was worth. She pulled up her mask before she even left the building. It wasn’t just about her identity, but an excuse to become a stranger to everyone, even to herself.
The streets were empty. It was a Saturday, but everyone was at work. Overtime was an obligation only managers had the right to refuse. She was illegally unemployed, and without an employer to update her citizen rights’ status, she would be thrown in jail for vagrancy if caught. Which meant wearing a mask patterned with dazzle camo and reflective strips, no matter how hot it was. She had heard they were working on cameras that identified you by your eyebrows, but she was willing to shave them off before getting a steady job.
The drone buzzed overhead. She felt its gaze prickle the back of her neck. She made sure not to step on the ants and cockroaches that would occasionally spring from cracks in the sidewalk. She felt a kinship with them beneath the great eye overhead. She had halfheartedly convinced herself that treating life like it had value now could make up for how she treated it in the past.
By the time she had reached the mercantile quarter, a few people were finally leaving work. A pair of hunched old women, who had fashioned a comal out of scavenged steel siding, were cooking offal over a jungle fire. It was probably the most honest way to make a living anymore, outside of renting out your body each night, which she would do if she thought she had the looks or constitution to do so. Her mouth watered at the smell.
She had once been a predatory animal, who fed herself by violence. Despite being on a collar when she had done so, it still felt more free and noble than stealing from Hamid. She took advantage of his kindness, and he only ever had more to give, which was more sickening than any punishment he could visit upon her. The thought made her want to lie down on the tracks that cut itself through the old street, but a train hadn’t passed through in ages, and suicide was too dramatic for the mercantile quarter at this hour.
She visited a woman that she called ‘Helen’, who was a bouncer at a place that everyone called ‘Slut,’ even though it was named ‘Strut’. Helen was around forty years old by now and sort of pandurate, with big shoulders and a big belly that looked fantastic in her tank top, which was see-through with sweat in the early evening heat. She had once convinced herself that she was in love with Helen too, and looking at the see-through tank top, she could probably do so again if properly motivated. But she was hungry, and so she asked Helen a few questions, said goodbye, and left before she told the bouncer anything embarrassing.
With Helen’s answers she found a dealer and had more questions, then found a dealer’s friend, and a dealer’s friend’s dealer, and then a dealer’s friend’s dealer’s cousin, and that dealer’s friend’s dealer’s cousin’s acquaintance, who was also a dealer. They all lived a very short distance from each other in the merc quarter, each selling different mixes of designer chemicals. Dealing drugs was one of the few vocations that someone who was illegally unemployed could hold that could actually pay rent for an apartment that was a little less terrible than the one she shared with Hamid. She did not have the aptitude for it, so instead she fulfilled the least profitable vocation of one illegally unemployed: the drug addict.
In these sorts of transactions, the customer was perhaps the least powerful she has ever been in her life. In prison, where she was treated as an animal, she was at least surrounded by others of like circumstance. In prison, buying drugs was less like shopping and more like when band members pass around the same wad of cash to one another to buy survival another night. Everyone was desperate. But between a dealer and an addict, the dealer holds all the cards, and the addict holds their dick in their hand and prays for God to kill everyone in the apartment building at once.
There was a juicehead on the couch watching television. It was only commercials but his eyes were glued to the screen regardless, and his hand was glued to the grip of the 40-caliber pistol tucked conspicuously into his waistband. The dealer was a skinny kid who ought to be in school with his head down a toilet, who was explaining in detail the neurochemical properties of his products. His nose was a shade of red that pissed her off for some reason. Seven years ago she would have broken the kid’s larynx and broken the juicer’s hand before either could even cry for help. Seven years ago she would have taken the drugs as tribute and spat on them as payment. But seven years ago was seven years ago, and now she was stuttering out what she wanted.
She was louder than she had intended. The juicer looked away from the TV. The kid snorted like she had said something funny, before producing a few synthetic morphine analogues similar to her preference. One was a tag, which she didn’t know how to apply and therefore pretended like she was after something more specific. Contrarianism was an adequate shield for trepidation. Another was a medical-grade piperidine benzylfentanyl, and the last was literally junk—a pethidine salt wrapped in that thin crummy plastic you can never find in any store but you sometimes find wrapped around cheap food or used for bagged drinks. It looked like it had been made at the bottom of a bleach bottle.
A great merit of being a drug dealer is that they can be upfront about pricing, and that they rarely needed to haggle. After an obligatory attempt at getting the medical-grade stuff, she relented for a week’s supply of the cheap stuff, which was more in her budget.
Spending money that isn’t yours is something you tell yourself is harder than spending your own money before you do it. After she did it, the rush of having lost nothing but your soul (an appendix of cognition that has never served anyone in this great country) was almost worth the nausea of guilt that made her sway as she stood to accept her purchased goods. But she was hungry. The kid snickered when she dry-heaved, and she looked at him with such unalloyed violence that she immediately feared that he would sicc the meathead on her. She thanked him, and left hastily.
She walked home. It was dark by now, and the clubs had begun to fill up. The economy was doing well—it was likely why the dealer had more uppers compared to the paltry selection of opiates. More people were cooking, selling, or going to clubs. A pair of outta-towners were taking pictures in front of graffiti that someone had decided was an iconic landmark of the city. She idly wondered if it was worth robbing them—whatever they had could offset what she had stolen from Hamid, and she would feel less guilty about stealing from some white people from whoknowswhere than from her only friend.
But she was tired. She was hungry. And nobody even carried mugger money anymore. The economy was finally doing well again and it meant that human life was cheaper than ever. So she left the mercantile sector. The closer she got to home, the more tag-heads she saw. The brightly-colored tetra slips that one licked and stuck on the back of the ear were the new way people consumed drugs. It provided an oral and transdermal experience with different chemical intoxicants that people said were unique to them. They had become popular while she was still in prison, and so she avoided the things with a primitive fear of the new. Getting high was something that tended to call for brand loyalty, and good ol’ heroin was always kind to her.
She returned to the apartment that she shared with Hamid. Hamid wasn’t there. He had probably insisted on escorting Prophet home. So she found his needles, and his gauze patches, and a length of tubing, and all the tools and disinfectants she would need, and she locked herself in the bathroom.
She dissolved the pethidine salts in water, cooking them in a spoon with a lighter she had lifted out of Prophet’s hoodie when they had dragged him inside. The bathroom’s crummy extractor fan did nothing for the metallic-smelling fumes. Hamid had once said that she would make a good surgeon. That she had a steady hand. Her hand was shaking when she stripped naked and cleaned herself with rubbing alcohol and pulled the cap from a needle with her mouth. She was nothing if not efficient and clean, even when nearly mad with hunger. Heroin wasn’t unlike absinthe in the way it demanded rituals of its adherents.
She settled into the bathtub and she sated her appetite for a moment, and all of her mistakes and sins were worth it for that precious moment. She sighed as the pain finally fled her body, and closed her eyes. She tasted in the back of her throat that the salts had been cut with something, and her last thoughts before slipping into the fever-warm jaws of Death was how absurd it was that she had become enough of an opiate sommelier that could taste junk from the inside. She needed a new hobby.
Darkness took her, and she died for the seventh time.