I took the long route to school; figured I’d see what the scene was like at the library. Things were mostly as I expected, a few frustrated cops standing around asking questions, kids just staring, even though there was really nothing to see, a homeless man claiming he saw it all and would tell for a reward. What I didn't expect was to see Waldin just outside the entrance, smoking. I cannot recall whether I was more surprised to see Waldin smoking or to see him at all. As he saw me approaching, he gave a slight nod of the head and a broad smile. Why his smile struck me as so odd, so bothersome, I never quite decided, but it just didn’t seem to fit the circumstance. I put on my best “what the hell happened here?” face and tried to see shake off my disorientation. Before I could pretend not to know what happened…
“How have you been, kid?”
The bothersome smile still lingered on his long unshaven face.
“Uh, you know me. Getting by. School’s going well. It’s a lot different now. Do you know what—?”
“That’s good to hear. That’s really good to hear. Still playing every day?”
“Yeah, tips are getting better. This guy sat down the other day, watched me play for like thirty minutes. Didn’t say a word until he got up to leave. Said he worked at some art school across town and if I ever wanted to do a demo he thought his students would love it. I figured it’d be nice to do something for the kids. Turns out it’s a university. Took the seven back home real fucking quick.”
For the first time the odd expression abandoned his face.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, man. That’s not me. It doesn’t matter. What the hell happened here?”
“Someone finally got smart I guess.” He took another draw.
“What?”
“Someone broke in last night. Stole all the laptops and a TV. Did a damn good job too.”
“Shit. All of them?”
“Yeah, God forbid someone will have to crack open a fucking book now.”
I couldn’t help but let out an uncomfortable laugh. A nearly awkward silence ensued.
“Well, you need to get out of here. Class starts in like”—he took a glance at the now cracked, leather-banded watch he was never seen without—“thirty minutes.”
I couldn’t have been more than five minutes away.
“Aight, I’m going. I’ll catch you later. Or whenever you actually show up to work.”
“You take care of yourself, Leon. You take care of yourself.”
Not even getting high could get Waldin off of my mind. And that was saying a lot considering what I managed to cope with in an altered state of mind. There was just something utterly unshakeable about the way he came off early that day. I took a deep draw and looked out at the lights. My friends and I used to go up to the top of this marketing building to get high whenever we got the chance, which, considering our mean class attendance, was pretty damn often. I’m not sure if they were ever really my friends or just guys I got high with. I guess maybe Waldin was my only friend too. We knew a guy who worked the late shift as a janitor there and he’d let us in if we smoked him up. We figured it was perfect. If somehow the cops came we’d see them coming from a mile away. Even if they, by some absurd incident, surprised us up there, all we had to do was toss our shit off the building. It may not have done much for Waldin, but for most of us it was the best view we’d ever seen, as depressing as it might sound.
Far from the tallest building in the city, but it made us feel big. We’d look down at the late-working business men and squash them in between our fingers. We had the power. They were the insignificant drones. For a moment our excess of dopamine convinced us we were freer than them. No one ever admitted it, but we all thought about jumping, at some point, whether too high or too low. I could see it in their stained eyes as they’d peer over the edge, fixated. We never talked about that shit though. We’d just joke about doing things we’d never do or get in circular debates about which chicks were hot from thirty stories up.
I know we all had at least one “what if?” moment. Like when you’re walking on the edge of a sidewalk on a busy street and a bus flies by, so close you can feel it, and you just think, What if? What if something took over me for a fraction of a second, and I took that step? What if I jumped? I guess when we were high we were more concerned with, what if I fell? But, for me at least, the real question was, would I even care? Would people on the street stop, horrified, but then quickly carry on with their lives? Would my “friends” even stop smoking? Maybe, at that point, everything was moving so slowly I’d have time to live a full, decent life before I even hit the ground. Maybe that’s why we all liked it up there so much, because, beyond everyone else seeming small and below us, we did have power. We all had the power of being an instant away from a decision of undeniable significance. A power that we all felt so far removed from in our daily lives. We all were horrifyingly freer, but also closer to death, than we’d ever been. We were closer than when Trevor got beat down to the bone over some supposedly sub-par dope, closer than when Andre got way too crossed off of oxy and schnapps and almost never came back, closer than when the cops let the dogs go on Mario and they hit an artery, even closer than when Jordan and I stared down the barrel of a .45 with an inebriated half of our fucking genetic make-up on the other side of it. And somehow there was some ludicrous inner serenity in that.
There was an empty bottle of some type of Smirnoff Ice, raspberry or cherry, when we went up there the first time. It sat on the six inch cement barrier that bordered the whole rooftop, and, though the alcohol was long gone, the almost too sweet smell of whatever they put in those damn things still lingered. We’d joke about how some light-weight executive must have come up to the roof to try to catch a buzz before “the big presentation”. Every now and then, one of us would get caught staring at the bottle, and upon realizing that everyone was looking, we’d all break out into laughter from the arid backs of our throats. We never did anything with bottle, but it was always there. It became a part of our crew, and not unreasonably so, since it did essentially the same thing as any of us did once we got high. Someone suggested we bring some girls up there one night and play spin the bottle with it. I guess we weren’t quite aware that trespassing and risking death to smoke squashed joints in the middle of winter was not most girls’ ideal way to spend a Tuesday night.
That particular night, the one after the library break in, I really wanted to lose my mind. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who decided to push the envelope. Andre had long lost his head, and was starting to lose his feet, when he got a bit too close to the edge and knocked the bottle over. We all flinched when we heard the glass hit the cement ledge. I swear we all almost tried to save it. After the bottle made its descent, after it shattered into a million pieces, after the piercing noise traveled back up to ours ears, nothing was the same. We all were forced to accept that falling was a possibility, a reality. It might as well have been one of us who fell.
Nothing was said for quite some time. Before any of us could ask why the hell we were making such a big deal out of a fucking bottle, we’d be back to just giving each other the nod in the halls at school the next day. A part of me already knew it would be our last time up there. I just took the opportunity to take it all in once more. I always loved the lights, the ones in the top of slim, metal poles, the ones encased by yellow rectangles hanging above intersections, the ones coming from scattered office cubicles, the seasonal colored ones oddly placed on the tops of skyscrapers. Up there they all looked like hazy spheres, constantly leaking and absorbing energy. Normally you can only look directly into a light for so long without an odd, brain-rattling sensation, but when you were high you just got lost in the light. And whether you didn’t care enough or it was actually what you wanted, you didn’t fight it.
On that last night, I remember an urge within me to call what I saw before me beautiful. Could there be beauty in something so artificial, so uncomfortably geometrical, so unnatural? Maybe not. All it was, essenti
ally, was squares on top of squares on top of squares, with a triangle on top. I could have made one hell of a joke about cooperate America with that one, but I figured no one would understand it anyways. It seems to be an all too frequent conclusion for me.
“For so long it seems I have been trying, with all my might, to force a square into a triangular hole. I told myself if I became strong enough or clever enough, I could find a way to maneuver something into the void that didn’t quite belong. Or better yet, maybe I have been trying to fill a square hole with a triangle. This seems more reasonable. The triangle fits. There is no struggle. But it still leaves much of the void vacant. Though there is something in the space, emptiness still remains. In theory, I should be a terrible Tetris player. I just wish that something would fit. Maybe that’s why drugs are so euphoric, the illusion of the perfect fit. The chemical structure mimics the neurotransmitter, temporarily filling the void, and dopamine is released. It’s not what you really want, but for a while your body can’t tell the difference. But when you come back down, the void is just a little bit larger than it used to be.” - W
Chapter 11