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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book “The Beach at Night” Down in the Dirt v212 (10/23) Order the paperback book:

Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology Instant Karma the Down in the Dirt September-December 2023 issues collection book		get the 422 page September-December 2023 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

You Can’t Catch What I Have

Rob Tannahill

    Waking up to the first day of flames is horror. Flames I can’t see but still burn in my flesh. Around me is a blue room, clean, stretched lines of broken lint on the carpet. Grab my thigh and ease my atrophied leg off the bed and its fellow follows. There is an empty suboxone strip next to the lint. I pick it up—grab my good leg and eke my trunk forward, reaching until my hand is close to the floor, then snatch it—and think about licking the inside of the package, but I know that is useless. No trace amounts linger on its silver innards. A foot from the empty is the heating vent I used to play capsule ball, tossing emptied kratom tabs into the duct to listen to their soothing rattle while I was on my final nod. That’s all done now, hence the fire. Burning, I ease myself into a sitting position on the floor and pop the grille off the vent with a screwdriver. I remove the few apparent capsules and hope the lost ones are not bivouacked deep in the galvanized trails of the system. I pop the grille back into its slot and lay down again in stages, fundament first, grab my thigh, hoist and spin and its fellow follows. Hip explosions. I have hissing fissures for joints and the smell of old opiate trash seeps from within my mucosal lining, muddying olfactory canals with rank catarrh like creosote.
    Soon after I am drinking coffee while questioning my motive to ingest caffeine. My body trembles in amplified revolt. The only thing worse to drink than coffee right now is alcohol, but I quit that drug many years ago and coffee tastes good. I need something good. I take my poison into the garage and light a cigarette, then stuff my pipe with cannabis. O still an addict, the inner critic yatters before going back to his usual litany of reasons why I ought to go back to the street and the needle. I sip the coffee and it tastes like ambrosia but hits my belly with razors and I drink some more.
    Back inside the news is on and I’m not paying attention to it. Breathing, the art of respiration, the yoga necessary to unconfuse the little muscles on strike in my ribs into scabbing, all the wind goes down into the belly and my feet begin to wobble. Nefarious narcotic elemental hits me in the small of a back with a taser while an afreet companion beats my amygdala with a mallet. Panic, the yen seeking to leash me and drag me out the door into the snowy desert of Nevada, cold be damned, I will suffer anything to put an end to my suffering. That means quitting the sickness of un-life, live free of the score. I weigh 135 pounds when I should weigh 175. My wide hips protrude inches beyond my shoulder stems, the skin there raised in stanchions that jut from either side of my body. Another taser hit and I am panting like stray dogs in summer as the afreet works my panic button with his beater.
    I am nice to my mother and her husband who are forcing me to kick here. They corralled me into it by purchasing a non-refundable bus ticket from Houston to Reno and telling me when and where to pick it up. I had to go, fantasy of fixing my life, of loving, writing, living inside, all unavailable things to the hobo. I did not ask either of them for a dime while homeless. Rather I ran Texas like a thread of amphetamine crawling down the crease of a foil boat. For years I haunted the viaducts on highways 59 and 45, washing windows on the corners at the end of every concrete break, spent tens of thousands of dollars on varied species of narcotics and tens of dollars on foodstuffs. I told them over the phone in preamble to their corralling me in with the purchase.
    But right now, I lurch to the bathroom and grab on to the rim of the toilet bowl. As I lower my twisted knees to the tile I gape and release a half-pint of egg yolk into the calm porcelain lake that stinks of Clorox.
    Three days in Mom asks, “Are you still sick?”
    “I am. But you can’t catch what I have.” Wan smile. My legs work on their own. I limp around the wood flooring dodging birdcages and cooing to the Myers parrot and the Black Top Conure both watching my movements. I know their names and I call, “Sydney, Piccolo.”
    “They still remember you,” Mom says. I say nothing but stretch another smile and pray for her not to say more. I make a cricket noise with my larynx and Piccolo loves it. He makes it back to me and I walk, walk, and walk on a leg that struggles to hoss my slight freight while my ruined hip turns the muscles there into ground beef. My sizzling nervous system doesn’t even register this as a thing unto itself. I walk in panicked compulsion for hours before I give out.
    “How long does it last?” Mom asks. I know what she means.
    “Around the time I’m sure I’ll lose my mind it’ll break. And I’ll wonder why I ever touched the stuff.”
    It takes me four days to have a shower. I hike my good leg over the lip of the porcelain. I grab the window ledge for support, turn, and use my other hand to help my twisted left foot get over the lip. Homunculi erupt from my light body in microbial spawn and crawl over my skin, a vision chittering, nibbling; their dust merges with droplets of fire spiders dancing on me, wrapping me in a blanket of moist agony. My eyes rattle. I cannot make sense of the sun blazing through the chunks of brick glass above my head. My hair is rubber fibers. Soaping, cool breeze sensation of pores releasing body wax into the lower element that flows into the bath. Coughing, sputtering, wanting to die, afraid I won’t, let the swirl above the drain take my malfunctions along with errant urine, and the soap. Maybe die now. Or lay down in the bathtub but the acrobatics surely necessary for me to exit the tub from a prone post are not worth it. And the cloying steam makes me gag. The egg yolk joins everything else I sluiced down into the sewer, where it may feed rats or discorporate. I fling the vinyl curtain. Sandpaper on the towel.
    On the seventh day Hermes visits to show me what happens when I owe him a debt. Splayed on the couch, clutching, dehydration cramps bending my bones. I reach for my water bottle and sip, endless sipping, add water and get those endorphins from the soul to connect. My internal bellows transmute oxygen into prana, freezing in hypothalamus malfunction which anticipates another fevered week of toxic outflow and if I do not cool off, I’m going to die. I stop breathing and stay stopped by sheer apathy of will. The imp and his afreet cahoot tase and hammer away I can’t take it anymore I stare at the ceiling a cobweb pole fluttering in the breeze of the central heating unit and my soul begins leaving my body.
    I guess that’s it, I think, and start to tell my mother. But my mouth refuses to work and my eyes are spinning airplane rotors and the room’s corners flower in parallax. Geometric constructs unfold to receive my soul. I expect to see a crow, but the walls only shrink, and smoke is coming from my pores. Ether rises twisting into a fluted funnel above where my bellybutton hides beneath drab cotton, and I can see it. I grab for it—haze, then dots, then darkness and my heart lurches with a late beat. The swirl at my bellybutton stops; a mechanical merry-go-round spins itself in my chest and works my soul back into my root chakra like an industrial loom. Twice I’ve been cast out of heaven. First the heaven of the heroin and meth on the block and now this. I was almost excited for the reprieve, but it seems samsara isn’t finished with Dianne’s boy Bob, but Hermes is for the now and I watch his luminescence fade backwards into the wall, he breaks against the plasma screen still roiling with broadcasters and their snark and that’s it, I’m still alive.
    Two days later I am hunched over in the social services office bawling and sniffling and choking on loathing and demented figuring out how to live without corporeal ease—she grabs my hands and tells me to close my eyes and she breathes through an oxygen tank and wants me to meditate with her. At the end of the rope and she hands me a vape pen and tells me to have a puff outside but don’t tell any of her clueless assistants at the front desk about the pen or they’ll give her flack for still needing nicotine. The pen reminds me of dope. And I go back inside feeling better, one of the assistants makes me coffee, and I fill out two hours of electronic intake paperwork. I do not complain. I do shake as I work, and I tense up and stop and I stare and huff chronically as I wait for a searing wave to abate.
    And I wake up fine on day ten. No more horror. I step out the door ready to hustle and score before I realize that I’m five miles away from anywhere and there are no buses and walking through the chaparral is not an option. Desolation; stretch of highway 50 an hour past Reno in the nowhere between Ely and Carson City. It reminds me I have to quit. My left leg has no play in its segments. Imbalance rocks my shoulders like a newspaper boat thrashing down a sewer ripple in the dead winds towards the same heating vent I tossed the tabs into, the last strip I ate, or will ever. If I can just not score. I need to not score. I need to write and ground myself and put my life back together. I have no recourse to the gray dawn anymore.
    I stretch brick and I get my leg back from the car that smashed it years ago and relearn how to ride a bike. It takes ten months. I try one stretch, then many, daily through the pain until my hips get the memo and open so I can work the pedals. The law took my license a long time ago.
    I seek a job run by those who can look beyond what kind of things I have done in the past being nothing too terrible when weighed by street scales. Nothing more than self-defense and washing windows, using the needle. By divine order disease free. But homeless junky can be read on my mummy’s face and will not fade. I study the ciphers of addiction on my trailer hitch cheeks and in the tributaries leading away from them to my lips. I tell my reflection that no one in Nevada will notice as I work with the monad to fix karma I chewed like blasting caps and then spat into the Houston bayou.

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