Slipping Away

Before he opened his eyes the pain was fierce, a throbbing near the top of his head and a pulsation between the temples. He reached up a sluggish arm to his head, still keeping his eyes as tightly shut as possible, and tried massaging the pain away but it only got worse. Covering his face with his hands to leave a few cracks between his fingers, he opened his eyes and the pain intensified to a staggering level. He was grateful to be lying down or he would have fallen. He grunted with the pain and rolled over. The sheets seemed sticky and for a moment he was worried he’d somehow pissed himself. Gingerly he reached a hand down towards the dampest area of the bed and felt around. It didn’t seem to be warm, which was something. Deciding knowing was better than not knowing, he brought his arm up to his nose and took a tentative sniff. He sighed, just sweat.

Using his nose seemed to have awoken some of his other senses and he was aware of his bed feeling unusual. Since childhood he had needed a special mattress to help his slightly miss-aligned back. He was aware of a dull ache near the base of his spine, a sure sign he had slept very badly and, more troublingly, in a bed other than his own. His eyes were beginning to focus, and the colour of the room struck him as odd, but although they all seemed to operating normally, his senses had not yet started to communicate with each other. Realisation slowly dawned, this was not his bedroom.

Panicked, he looked around and tried to gain his bearings. This was definitely not his bed; the mattress was soft and squishy – not aided by the sweat. The light was wavering, and he spotted a lava lamp in the corner casting an ever-changing amber glow over the room. The colour of the walls swam from a deep green to blue with the shifting light. Heavy blue curtains kept the room dark, though he could make out a crack of light sneaking through at the edges. His gathering wits told him it was probably well past nine in the morning. Scouring the room he found an alarm clock whose gaudy red lines told him it was 10:34am. There was a piece of paper next to the clock, but for now he took no notice of it.

Ignoring his groaning muscles Ryan pulled himself out of the bed and then shot back under the covers. He was trying to figure out how he had not realised he was naked. He rapidly looked around the room again, searching for any signs of other people. The faint noise of the world was coming from behind the curtains, but otherwise the room was silent. He needed clothes and after a brief search he collected them from all around the bed. A hint of memory came back to him and made him drop his sock. He looked around nervously again but he was still alone. The terror of being clothe-less having passed, the throbbing in his head resumed with gusto. He dragged his weary limbs into what he hoped was a bathroom and took a leak before searching the cabinet for something to stop the pain. He found a large bottle of aspirin, apparently unopened. He quickly broke the seal and put three in his mouth. Using his hand as a cup, he got some water from the tap and swallowed. He hoped these pills were as fast acting as they claimed. He started to put the bottle away, but a sudden shock of pain down his back made him reconsider and he pocketed the pills for later.

Leaving the bathroom he took in the apartment again. Looking around he began to recall the events of last night, though curiously they were being played backwards in his head. There was a lot of drinking, all through the night, which explained the soreness in his stomach and the throbbing in his head. There were plenty of signs that this was a girl’s room, which gave him some comfort, but he was struggling to put either a name or face to it. His eyes came to rest on the paper next to the clock once more. His recovering eyesight picked out his name, and he grabbed it as if to stop it blowing away. Unfolding it, he read what he dreaded and yet somehow knew…

Hey Ryan,
            Last night was great. I honestly didn’t have you pegged as that kind of guy, but you were full of surprises. I have to leave for work now, some of us aren’t free all weekend like you office slackers! This was a lot of fun, you know where I’ll be if you ever want some more

Kristen
x   x   x

Shit. How did this happen? He fought hard against his ragged memories. Without warning he remembered more than he wanted. They had met in The Coachman, a bar in the noisier part of town, and he had initiated it. How much had he had? Ryan always thought of himself as a shy guy, especially when it came to women. He’d had a crush on Lisa for months and, despite working with her for nearly 40 hours a week, had failed to even get her phone number to arrange anything. He’d even heard from one of the other guys who dated one of Lisa’s friends that she kinda liked him too, but he’d be too much of a wuss to act on it. Kristen had reminded him of Lisa, the same slender build and shoulder length, blonde hair. After they’d talked for an hour and played a couple of games of pool she invited him back to her place for something to eat that wasn’t dripping with grease.

She lived not far from The Coachman in an apartment block with urine-drenched stairs and the muffled sound of crying babies and screaming mothers. It was the kind of place that fuelled the imagination of the world’s pessimists and doom-merchants, poets and song-writers, journalists and criminals. Somehow Kristen had created a haven in the rats’ nest, resplendent with blue and purple walls and retro lighting. After treading carefully up the three flights of stairs that led to her apartment, Ryan and Kristen were ready to collapse onto something soft and cozy. Kristen opted for a studio approach to her lodgings, with the bed occupying a place of honour, equidistant from the kitchen, bathroom and TV.

Bursting through the door Ryan and Kristen tumbled onto the bed and then started fooling around. Ryan failed to block out the events that followed; he knew that she kept plying him with alcohol and they continued to… he struggled for the words to describe it, even in his own head. He could remember that they’d done it more than once, and then the beer and tequila had caught up with him. He glanced around the other side of the bed and saw the bucket, still containing the former contents of his stomach. How did I let this happen? Shit! The rest of the night was a blur, but he assumed that after the vomiting the sex had probably ended, and eventually sleep claimed them both. Despite remembering all this, it was the events before he met Kristen that made Ryan’s head spin.

Two months ago life had seemed pretty great for Ryan. He was enjoying some welcome attention from his superiors at work, as well as catching the eye of Lisa. He had reached a solid financial base, with a large amount of his savings wrapped up in a very promising and, thus far, profitable investment. His younger sister had just got married to a decent enough guy who had inviting Ryan to join his poker group. It was hard to imagine that 61 days could change so much.

The first shock was the news that his parents were having massive financial difficulties and that if something didn’t happen fast they were going to have their home repossessed by the bank. Ryan had been able to help out to an extent, but his money was still tied up in that e-business and would be for at least another six months. Ultimately his parents were able to reach an agreement with the bank to sell the property and move to a much smaller house. The move had unsettled everyone, and had also meant that Ryan’s childhood home was gone. The nest he had flown six and a bit years ago had been smashed out of the tree.

Two weeks later his sister, Cathy, called him with great news, she was pregnant and Ryan was going to be an uncle. Whilst ecstatic for his little sister, the news hit Ryan hard. He was three years older than her, and didn’t really have any relationship to speak of, save some flirting with Lisa. The tremors became a fully fledged quake just a couple of days later. Ryan had just got home from work when the phone rang; he struggled to understand the voice on the other end of the line. Eventually he understood enough and flew from the house like a whirlwind. At the hospital he tried to gather his thoughts before entering the room. On his way to the hospital his parents had filled him in on the details, sketchy as they were. His sister’s husband, Blake, had come home from work early and drunk. He was getting laid off for poor performance and now there was no way they could afford the baby that Cathy was carrying so he decided to try and beat it out of her. The beating had not only caused her to miscarry the child, but also caused massive damage to Cathy herself. She was in intensive care and in a critical condition. When he went into her room Ryan nearly threw up, she looked so small and bruised, with tubes all around her and monitors blipping and buzzing in the background.

A month passed and Cathy made progress and started to interact better with her family, but she was so much more sheltered and withdrawn like she couldn’t invest in people too much for fear of getting hurt again, she just wasn’t herself anymore. As Cathy improved things are work were on a downward spiral. Ryan had spent so much time at Cathy’s side that he had taken his mind off work and, with a position available higher up; found himself lagging badly behind his friend Mark. He and Mark had joined the company at the same time and had advanced at a fairly even rate, neither edging out the other for long. The available position was one of a kind, and losing out would put Mark or Ryan a long way behind the other for the first time. During the interview Ryan had been nervous, stammering over his answers and struggling to sell himself. He knew that Mark would have held up better and that he was staring at another year at least before a chance like this came his way again.

The day of his meeting with Kristen he had found out that Mark had got the position, complete with massive pay hike and shiny office. It was the final insult – that he had been overlooked because he had been caring for his critically ill sister. So, totally out of character, he had not gone straight home but straight to The Coachman and started a very heavy night of drinking. He had no intention of doing anything too crazy; he just wanted to blot out the events of the last two months. As he walked home from Kristen’s he found that alcohol not only failed to cover up his pre-mid-life crisis, but actually magnified it dramatically and brought it starkly into focus.

He found his car about a quarter of a mile from The Coachman, but decided against driving. Instead he went into the off license opposite and got a couple of bottles of cheap whiskey. He’d heard during his days at university that the best way to shake a hangover was to drink more. If nothing else it might make him forget things for a while. His head still throbbed when he reached his home and as his coat rattled when he hung it up he remembered the aspirin he had borrowed from Kristen. He took another few with a hefty swig of the whiskey and proceeded to collapse onto his bed.

When he woke it was around four in the afternoon, and his phone was ringing – it was Kristen. He turned his phone off and went back to sleep. The rest of his weekend was spent either asleep, drinking or with his head over some vomit-container.

Monday came with frightening aggression and determination, as if slapping him for his antics over the past few days. Ryan was late for work, excusing himself with ‘traffic’ rather than admitting that he had neglected to recover his car and hadn’t factored that into his travelling time when he left the house. At ten he looked around for Lisa near the water cooler, a little ritual she had developed and he had joined. She wasn’t there. He dialed Mark’s extension and Lisa answered. She was in his new office, drinking from his personal water cooler, talking to him in his new office with its water cooler, not talking to Ryan at the old-fashioned municipal water cooler. That stung, a lot. Mark knew that Ryan liked Lisa; he had talked about almost nothing else to him when they ate lunch on Tuesdays. What an arsehole! The headache rushed back and Ryan popped another couple of aspirin before mustering the courage to go talk to his back-stabbing friend.

As he walked over to the plush corner office that Mark now inhabited it occurred to Ryan that Lisa would probably still be in there with him. It was too late to turn back though; Mark had spotted him and called him over.

“Hey stranger,” Lisa’s voice, cool and elegant, rang out. Ryan turned around and saw Kristen standing next to Mark’s personal water cooler. He blinked. Ryan saw Lisa standing next to the cooler. He rubbed his temple.

“So did you have fun this weekend? Get up to anything surprising?” He knew it was Lisa talking, but in his head the words turned into Kristen’s. The voice became less elegant, more smoky and tainted. Fun, surprising… it was like the note Kristen had left. Did Lisa know something? How could that have happened? Shit! How could she know?

Ryan started to sway ever so slightly before he tumbled, face-first into the cooler. He hit it with enough force to topple the water tank out of its cradle and crashing to the floor. As it hit the plastic gave way and the bottle shattered into thousands of pieces, sending water gushing over the room, soaking Mark and Lisa. One piece of plastic shot through the air and cracked the large, south-facing window. Ryan hit the ground with a dull thud with the merest hint of a splosh.

Somehow he was back at home, with Mark and Lisa nearby. He could hear their voices but couldn’t make out the actual words because of the hushed tones they used. He risked cracking an eye open and immediately wished he hadn’t. With one eye barely half-open he saw Lisa cradled in Mark’s lap, they embraced and then kissed. He knew that kiss; it was one that he had been a part of a hundred times in his dreams. Now, in his waking nightmare, he was forced to watch his friend take his place. He groaned, and Lisa jumped off Mark and brushed herself down, though neither seemed to notice his half-cracked eye. Ryan dragged himself up and found out that their boss had suggested that they bring him home to recuperate. He thanked them and assured them that he could look after himself now.

In desperate search of perspective, Ryan reached for his CDs and put in Velvet Revolver. Flicking to the last track on Contraband Ryan cranked up the volume and searched for the second whiskey bottle. Crooning at the top of his voice Ryan drank himself quite drunk again. He put “Loving the Alien” on repeat and looked around for something else. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for until he heard the familiar rattle of the aspirin bottle hidden underneath yesterday’s laundry. He unscrewed the lid and glanced inside. He poured out the bottle: 42 left. He grabbed one and put it in his mouth and chased it with his whiskey.

“And I’m moving oh-ho-oh-on… and I’m moving ohn.”

Another pill and another shot.

“I feel like giving up is all we got”

Two more pills and a large swig.

“I never noticed how lovely were the aliens, lovely were the aliens”

More pills and more whiskey…

“And I’m moving oh-oh-on…”

Slowly Ryan passed out… At his side a nearly empty bottle of whiskey and a pile of 13 aspirin pills. He left no note, no message to the people he would leave behind. It never occurred to him that this would be the end.