I’m sitting and smoking and watching Alice pop these huge blue pills into her mouth.  She just scoops them up in her hand and pops them in like it’s nothing, and I’m sitting there watching this and I’m petrified.  I don’t know how the hell she’s doing it, just scooping them up like that, knowing.  I can’t stand to watch it but I know I have to, so I just fucking stare at her doing it and smoke more.

I just keep feeling shocked how she just scoops them up in her hand and pops them in.

She’s been through the chemotherapy.  She’s seen… I don’t even know how to write about this.

I was lying in bed, working on my laptop, and I turned it off to go to sleep.  I do this – not that you care what the fuck I do because I certainly wouldn’t if I were you – I do this until I get sleepy and then just turn it off and go to sleep.  And no sooner have I done this than I think about having a heart attack.  I think about – I’m there with the lights off, and I suddenly think about having a heart attack.  I imagine this pain in my chest and how I’d think that I was dying and how everything would change in that instant.  And this wave of horror – just plain horror sweeps over me.  Like this chemical wave of total fear, of being trapped in this body that’s having a heart attack and having no way out.  The heart, the chest in pain, so close to the head.  So close to me.  And I know that I can’t sleep.  Because I’m thinking… I know that there will be no sleep tonight.

I calm down in my soft bed, soft blankets, and it’s then that I think of Alice and remember those blue pills going into her one and only mouth like it’s nothing, like it’s aspirin or something like that, and the look on her face as she takes my hand.

There’s still time to pump her stomach, I think.  But I know there’s not and she’s not going to.

Instead, she takes my hand.  She’s less horrified than I am.  I’m staring at her bald head and her mouth where the pills went in with those lips and all their singleness and at that bald head and those lines under her eyes that have never seemed beautiful to me before and I can’t imagine how I couldn’t see them before, how I couldn’t hear their beauty, and I think how selfish I am, how I’m only thinking of my death, how I only agreed to be here because I thought I had to, because I couldn’t say no, how I even thought how it’d be educational to prepare me for my own death when it’s doing nothing but.  Nothing but the opposite.  But making me realize how unprepared I am and how terrified I am and how I never will be prepared.

The pills are in her blood and I’m just sitting there, smoking, letting my stupid ash fall on the stupid floor and thinking, alive, how I can’t believe how calmly she put those pills into her mouth and just swallowed, like it was nothing.

I’m a liar.  I lie for a living.  I am a selfish, superficial person.  I use women for sex.  I use women for comfort.  I use my friends for conversation.  I do good things and help people not because it’s good but because it’s the only way I can fucking sleep at night.  I don’t pretend I have a morality any more complex than that.  I envy people without any morality at all.  I don’t believe in God.  I know it’s irrational to fear my own death.  I want to write great and true things but know even that doesn’t matter.  We’re all insects on the face of a planet we don’t understand.  I want us to get off-world.  I dream of better things for us.  For myself too.  But no sooner do I dream than I know it’s bullshit, that it doesn’t matter too.  That no one really cares if the last human eye stops moving and you stop feeling a pulse in Alice’s wrist.  I want to die.  I’ve wanted to kill myself for twenty years now.  Never had the courage.  Always felt that rush of fear when it came time.  Always known not to, that it doesn’t matter anyway, that I might as well live and take some small pleasures if only because they let us forget that we fucking disappear and everyone who knew us will disappear and our names and our beings will vanish from this earth and none of it will matter nor ever has mattered.  I want a hot dog.  To enjoy the relish.  To let it be that.

Alice feels the pain in her stomach, and it’s then that she puts the plastic bag over her head.

I can’t believe she’s doing this, and I’m crying for her and know I’m only crying for myself.

Her nose sucks the bag in and out, tight and loose, against her mouth and those lips.  She’s looking through this claustrophobic little bag and she looks happy.  Or at least not petrified.  And then she rolls her eyes back and leans back against the bed.  I can’t imagine.  I just keep crying and holding her hand and condemning myself and feeling an animal fear without any predator you can run away from.

She shits and pisses and it stinks like death.  Like the shit we are.  There’s condensation on the inside of the bag, but no in and out anymore.  She did this to herself because God cursed her with cancer.

What we call God is all the chance and luck and shit we can’t control in the universe and can’t even imagine understanding some day.  We take all this uncertainty and we roll it into a ball and call it God.  Because if you can build a church to it and kneel to it and call its name, it can’t be a fucking void anymore.  So we can just go on with our lives, not seeing Alice dying, until it comes time for us to lie in bed with chest pains or to put the pills in our lips and somehow find the courage to swallow death.

Alice didn’t pass away.  Alice didn’t euphemism anything.  She fucking died.  Don’t you ever call it anything else.

I’m the selfish bastard who turned it into a story.  Who packaged all her pain and all he saw of it.  Who took those tears and tied all this bullshit fucking existential angst in a bow and made a fucking trinket out of it that others could enjoy in their own masochism.

I know it’s selfish to turn this into something about me, but I want to say that I was there.  That I smelled the shit Alice became.  She didn’t expel it.  She became it.

Alice was my friend.  She had cancer.  I know it doesn’t matter for shit, but I’d just like to stop lying to myself.  She’s gone and she left nothing for the world.  All the beautiful stories of her life, all the observational power, all the creativity, all the times she made me or someone else feel better, all those little precious idiosyncratic wonderful memories are full in me but always twists and already fading.

Tomorrow, I will brush my teeth and pretend it matters.  And pretend I should.  And get on with the forgetting we call life.

I know three things.  I am a selfish prick.  Oh, yes, I know you’ve seen the good in me, but trust me, yes, I am really a selfish fucking prick.  In my thoughts and wishes and all my secret desires.  Two, I am a fundamentally superficial person.  If I stay with you when you’re fat, it’s only because I think I should, and I’ll hate myself and pride myself for it, all at the same time.  Three, I am going to die.  And I’m not looking forward to it.  And I know I’ll lie to myself again and say, logically, “What’s the big deal?”  But I am fucking horrified of it.

I don’t presume to tell you that you’re the same, but all my suspicions point to yes.  All the evidence says yes, though I may be wrong.  I make no claim to truth but to those three statements.

Alice just scooped up those blue pills and swallowed them without any nervousness, like her body was letting go of its anxiety because it knew she was no longer viable to herself or her kin group.

But that’s bullshit intellectualizing, and fuck me for doing it.  No, Alice died with a plastic baggie over her head, and all that she was is extinguished, and that’s why we cry no matter what we claim we believe and profess to ourselves we believe.

My teeth need cleaning, the bills need paying, those novels need writing, the bullshit needs tending to.  I wish I could wake up.

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