"Possibilities"

He looked across the street and stared at an empty tree. In the dim light of the street lamps, the old oak looked like a dead hand, trying to claw its way out of the earth. He sucked in a long stream of acrid smoke and held it in his lungs, waiting for the nicotine to infiltrate his blood stream, waiting for the smoothness of a little tobacco high to even out his night. In his room there were two forties and a bottle of vodka waiting. A tall stack of porn and a short stack of novels waited to vie for his attention. The competition would not be intense.

He exhaled a bitter cloud and felt a little bit of heartburn irritate his stomach. He thought about not drinking tonight, taking a couple of Tums and sneaking into bed early. He thought about beginning to write the story that had been percolating in his mind for the last few weeks, or calling up the guys to come over for a couple rounds of poker. He thought about not spending the night alone in the basement of his parents’ house. He thought about calling her.

He knew that the possibilities for the evening were numerous, and that it didn’t matter how limitless they might be. He had already made his decision, and the events of the evening had been set in motion. The forces of gravity were less exacting than the forces at work within his body, so he took one last drag on his cigarette before flicking it into the street. He watched with a wistful resignation as a few red embers sparked off the pavement before dying. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, slumped his lanky shoulders, and went back inside.

His parents were in the living room as he walked through. They were arguing about something on the television and didn’t seem to see him passing. He no longer noticed their ignorance. Living with them was like living with apathetic strangers, and if living there had cost him a penny, he would have moved out long ago. As it was, he had adapted to the survivable mediocrity of his cheap surroundings.

He walked downstairs into the semi-finished basement he had been living in since he finished high school. He rounded a corner, passed the bathroom, and walked into his humble abyss.

It was a small room; the bed and bookshelf took up most of the floor space. A small TV was huddled on top of a nightstand in one corner, with a stack of case-less DVDs resting near the screen. Dirty clothing obscured the corners of everything and empty beer cans lurked underneath old papers.

He sat on the edge of his bed and opened his first can of beer. It was cheap and mostly tasteless, which was why he preferred it. He didn’t need to be classy in his alcohol choices tonight; no one was watching what he drank, and he certainly wasn’t drinking for the taste. He downed half the beer in a few quick swigs and set it on the floor.

He flipped through the stack of pornography next to the DVD player and was annoyed by the choices. They seemed stale. He’d seen them all too many times, and hadn’t been bothered to go to the store for anything new earlier in the day. He regretted that decision now and defeatedly stuck an unexciting selection into the open tray. He picked his beer back up and finished it while the title menu came onscreen.

He pressed play, opened the second beer, and picked up the bottle of vodka. He swallowed a few mouthfuls of the fiery liquid before quickly chasing with a drink of beer. A small voice in his mind told him to slow down, the whole evening was before him. There was plenty of time to drink half the bottle.

He couldn’t slow down. He took a few more shots of vodka, and half his second beer was gone. His head was beginning to reel as he pressed “mute” on the remote and yawned as two women began to undress each other onscreen. He lay back on the bed and picked up his blinking cell phone. She had sent him a text message telling him to call her. He considered the possibility for a moment, but decided to wait a few minutes before engaging her in conversation.

A cough began to build up in his chest and he sat up suddenly, the hacking shaking his whole frame. He couldn’t catch his breath, and tears were beginning to cloud his eyesight. After a few minutes of an exploding sensation in his chest, the coughing subsided. He went to wipe the tears from his eyes, but stopped when he noticed there was blood on his hands. He had coughed up blood.

What was that disease? he thought. The Poe one. The one that killed all Edgar Allen Poe’s women? Consumption? What was that? He squinted his eyes for a moment and tried to concentrate. Concentrate. TB. . . Tuberculosis?
He worried for a moment that he might be terminally ill. Coughing up a handful of blood was not a normal occurrence. He wondered if Tuberculosis was still going around and if it was a painful way to die. The worry morphed into a warm sense of relief as he concretely thought about dying in six months. He smiled.

He probably wasn’t dying. It more than likely had to do with his recent increase in smoking. He had moved from two or three cigarettes to two packs a day in the space of a week.

The realization that he wasn’t going to tragically die in six months was a grave disappointment to the evening. He found himself longing for the simplicity of a divinely mandated exit visa and felt cheated by the tease of blood in his lungs. He cleared his eyes with the back of his hand and wiped off the blood and saliva on a nearby t-shirt.

There was a blinking light next to his leg, and he stared for a moment before it registered that his phone was ringing. He answered her call and began to listen to the latest edition of bad-boyfriend weekly. She was crying into the phone and saying that she wished her boyfriend would be as sweet as he was.

He swallowed and mentioned that he would never hit her child. She said he was so sweet and went back to talking about the latest in her long string of loser boyfriends. For some reason it didn’t matter that he was blindingly drunk; he still couldn’t tell her to fuck off. He couldn’t avoid her calls, he couldn’t tell her how passionately he felt, and he couldn’t tell her to leave him alone if she didn’t want him.

He managed to make it through another five minutes of her pitiful gibberish before excusing himself and hanging up. The chicks were still going at it on the TV, and he couldn’t find his vodka. That didn’t matter too much, seeing as he didn’t have any beer left with which to chase it.

The evening was becoming too long. He looked at the clock, which was upside down from the twisted position he had posed himself in on the bed. He tried to make out what time it was, but he couldn’t stop the numbers from spinning. He closed his eyes and held onto the bed as the feeling worsened.

He stumbled into the bathroom and bent over the toilet just in time to vomit. He wiped away the tears that he couldn’t stop from coming whenever he threw up. He tried to gauge if this was going to be one of those rare single-vomit nights. Not so lucky, he thought as he puked again, and again.

When he thought he was mostly done he curled into a ball. He had one last thought before passing out on the floor of the bathroom, arms wrapped around the base of the toilet, hoping that the experience of being twenty-five would be better than the past year. Another shitty birthday.