But it’s too late. He’s gone.
Fuck this, I think. I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. Fucking through. No more saving Silas. Let him save himself. Or kill himself. I don’t care anymore. I just don’t fucking care.
Here’s the straw, here’s the camel’s back. Listen to it snap like a goddamn bone.
* * *
—
When Callie calls, I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. I lie to her about breaking Silas free and releasing him back into the wilds of Richmond. I feel bad about it but I’ve been down Relapse Avenue with Silas before. He’s always managed to pull himself out, hasn’t he? He’s stronger than his addiction—or that’s what I want to believe.
Silas has to survive himself. No one else can save him.
I can’t save him. Not anymore.
When he knocks on my door at three a.m.—poof, materializing out of thin air—I still can’t get over how little I recognize him. The flesh under his eyes has a sallow tint. His hair is wirier than before. This bag of skin and bones is supposed to be my friend.
He cups my face with both hands and presses his lips to my forehead. “Hey, Li’l Deb.” Deb, as in debutante. Funny, right? “Mind if I crash here tonight?”
Before the synapses in my brain fire off—I don’t think that’s a good idea, Silas—he pushes his way into my apartment. He’s still got his smiley-faced plastic bag with him.
“I’m fixing myself,” he starts right in, giving me the same spiel he always does. “I’m getting my shit together. I just need somewhere to stay…Somewhere I’m not alone.”
Just say no, I hear Nancy Reagan’s voice in my head. Silas isn’t the only addict here, and you need to focus on your own recovery. Go cold turkey. Let Silas go.
Say it.
Say—
“Okay,” I say, opening my home up to him even though he’s already inside.
“I swear I’m going to get better. Hand to God. You believe me, right?”
“Yeah,” I manage.
He’s already passed out by the time I walk into my living room. His shirt has slid up, exposing his prominent ribs against waxen skin.
I can’t tell if he’s still breathing or not, so I take a step closer. Just waiting for him to inhale. To see his chest rise. Fuck, I think as I lean in, please tell me he didn’t OD on my couch—
His breath catches. I leap back, my heart racing.
Tomorrow, I’ll call Amara and Tobias and beg for their help. His friends will be there for him this time. The ol’ undergrad gang back in action. Silas needs us.
Needs me.
But this is a ghost story. A ghost is someone caught in a loop, doomed to repeat the same actions over and over again. So who’s the real ghost here? Who’s haunting who?
Through it all, I still believe—need to believe—he is finally, finally turning a corner, even though I know that Silas is long gone now. He’s no longer the Silas we all knew.
What’s left of our friend is nothing more than a shadow of his former self. A phantom.
Silas was a ghost long before he passed away.
municipal waste
The intervention is Amara’s idea. I’m surprised how jealous I am that I hadn’t thought of it first. Whether I’m willing to admit it or not, this isn’t just for Silas. Not really. It’s for us.
We’re tired. We want to feel like we gave it our best, the ol’ college try, that we’ve done everything in our strength to help him get better…but none of us believe it’s going to help. Not really.
“He’s walking all over you, you know,” Amara shouts over the feedback from the bar’s shoddy sound system. “You’ve enabled a lot of this.”
“So this is all my fault?” I shoot back.
“I’m not blaming you…but just look at the two of you. Look at yourself, Erin.”
“What the hell have I done?”
“Um, pretty much everything he asks?”
Silas says can I stay the night.
Silas says can I borrow twenty bucks.
Silas says…
Poe’s, our favorite haunt, is in the basement of an antebellum house that was a storage spot during the rum-running days. There’s even an ancient cask in the storeroom that supposedly comes with its own fermented corpse. A moonshiner allegedly double-crossed the wrong boss and now he’s been pickling in the backroom for the last century. Poe’s offers a cocktail for brave souls called Blood of the Bootlegger, though why they don’t capitalize on the cross-promotion and call it the Cask of Amontillado is beyond me. That’s why I’m destined for employment at the McMartin Agency—brand synergy shall totally be thine thing. You might not have ever heard of this advertising firm, but you’ve certainly seen their work. Talking geckos. Free credit scores. You can even blame them for the Virginia Is for Lovers slogan.
Silas used to pick up shifts at Poe’s whenever James, the regular bartender, needed a night off to play a gig. That didn’t last. The manager caught him pouring beers for his friends and not charging us a dime, so he got the boot. He still hosts their open mic night, setting up foldout chairs and a microphone in the corner every Tuesday. Even if nobody shows, he’ll read his own poetry until the bar closes. Sometimes I’m his only audience.
Silas is a no-show tonight, though. I haven’t seen him since Tobias swung by earlier this afternoon to pick him up. They wouldn’t say where they were going. I didn’t ask, relieved that Toby was taking Silas off my hands for a few hours. The Strung-Out Baby-Sitters Club.
Instead of open mic night this Tuesday, Amara and I are treated to the dulcet harmonies of some local thrash band I’ve never heard of called Municipal Waste. Charming.
“It’s no surprise he’s not getting better,” Amara shouts between sips of her Stoli and soda. She just dyed her hair a superbly sterling silver. It absorbs the light from the neon Pabst sign hanging behind the bar. “Wait. You’re not still sleeping with him, are you?”
“What? No! Of course not.”
“I’m not judging.” She’s totally judging.
“No, I am not sleeping with Silas.”
“Message received.” I can always count on Amara to cut to the bone. She has no issue diagnosing everybody else’s problems, even if she can’t point that high-powered perception at herself—except in her writing, which edges into personal narrative, chronicling the liminal space of an Iranian Southern belle living in Virginia. Amara is of this world and utterly outside it all at once. She fantasizes about interviewing obscure bands for the Village Voice, penning essays for the Paris Review, living that good ol’ Didion existence. But for now she’s slouching her way through the graveyard shift at the 3rd Street Diner, serving coffee to dead-eyed drunks who never tip. She knows exactly how much her life sucks. No matter how much she gripes about it, she insists her waitressing gig must suck, that living at home with her family is the only choice, so she can keep her eye on the real prize: getting the hell out of Richmond.
I floated the idea of us being roommates right after graduation, but Amara wouldn’t hear it. Every penny she earns goes toward crossing the Mason-Dixon. Her sights are set on New York City, cliché as it is. She swears there’s a media internship at some Condé Nast publication waiting for her, the siren song of low-paid labor calling. After applying and getting rejected last year—and the following weeklong blur of a bender—she recalibrated her battle plan: if she can just rent some crappy apartment in Brooklyn and get the lay of the land up north, she’ll have a better chance at landing the gig and never returning to Richmond again.
Everybody knows Richmond is quicksand. If you don’t move out by graduation, the ennui of the city seeps into your system and you’re stranded. Our circle is a grim reminder of how little Amara has actually accomplished since college, and it’s becoming painfully obvious that she not-so-secretly feels as if her friends are the ones dragging her down.
Dealing with Silas’s addiction is probably the last thing Amara wants to worry about. And yet, here we are, back on our bullshit.