when, evil

7th Level of Caesar’s plaza, Row 9, I said goodbye to the Serbs and Mosette and headed north with mom over the finely paved roads of the NJ pine barrens along the Garden State Parkway, past Long Beach Island where I burned in the heavy waves each summer, past Asbury Park, Tom’s River, past Woodbury and Roselle and Staten Island, past Jersey City and the Holland Tunnel to the north, to the suburban wilderness. We arrived to dog shit from someone else’s dog on the porch. My sister remained upstairs – I could hear her conversation with a bo, it was going badly for him. Mom and I poured wine and smoked cigarettes in silence still digesting the fat and gristle of Atlantic City. I thought of _ _ _ _.
_ _ _ _ sent a barrage of texts about her sick dog. When she needs something and doesn’t know how to ask she reaches out with fears about dead and sick animals or dead and sick second cousins or some such. I told her to feed him rice and lean meat; ground beef. This turned into hours of meaningless back and forth about where to buy, how to prepare and deliver the food. Then, as the night continued and the drugs seeped through her tiny spleen and liver I recognized a change from the displaced concern to self abasing apathy.
Text: somebody kill me please
Text: OK, Spill the beans
Text: no beans, just waiting for death
Text: death will come, not to worry
Text: hahahahahha, I know
Minutes pass
Text: you’re suffering a broken heart, you got it bad, you should just talk about it
Text: yea, for g maybe. Text: best to talk to no one. Hahahahhahaha.
There is now days of this, I thought. No substance. Nothing closer to heart. No sense of apology. I felt it bleeding me.
Text: OK, I gotta go babe
Text: Sleeping?
Text: Yes, travel all day tomorrow, etc
Text: OK, bye.
Minutes pass. I receive another text. Text: I’m just waiting for hell.
I return, Text: then hell is what you’ll get
This broke my heart. Our connection was still breaking my heart. I felt no hope in her and I recognized the sludge. Evil.
Text: that’s what I choose. I choose hell.
Text: that’s it babe, no more contact, good luck.
Text: you too. good luck.
Perpetually being handed into the hands of death, it’s the very definition of dysfunction. The feel of it is human stain.

At some point there was a struggle but _ _ _ _ had since given up that struggle to just plain go evil. On intention. Which is not violence or incorrigible madness but the long dull hoarseness of apathy and the measured waste that comes with it. The giving up. The stolid rhythm of heroine and oxycontin at an apex where nothing more could be added or subtracted to the utterly complete longing nature of it. I dragged on my cigarette and eyed mom who had little clue to the nature of my thoughts. I told her some but she couldn’t condone them or the danger which I expose myself to but at 60 and on the job market again and a survivor, a happy one, she listens and pays the tab when she can and even when she can’t. I thought this as I sent the final text asking _ _ _ _ not to contact me again. But she would, we both already knew this. I’d be asked to the deposition or to the reckoning or to the execution. I would answer the call eventually after she’d mustered enough sense to appease my need for at least the promise of hope. And we’d all go down. This, essentially, is the pure beautiful misery of it.