The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

anymore. “I feel the empty.” Something wet splashed in the middle of the pile of white powder. “I feel the minute of decay.” It was a tear. “I’m on my way down now.” I was crying. “I’d like to take you with me.” I couldn’t even remember the last time I had cried—even felt—like this. “I’m on my way down.” I completely broke down.
    â€œCould you come up to the control room?” crackled a voice over the P.A. system.
    â€œAll right,” Trent said when I arrived, “we think you’re overdoing it.”
    â€œI think you’re laying on the emotion a little too thick there,” Dave added. “We’ll let you do it one more time, but lay off the theater. This isn’t Shakespeare.”
    â€œI don’t think you really…,” I began but stopped myself. I didn’t think it would accomplish anything to tell them that if they were my friends, as I had once thought, they would have understood that my desolation was real.
    I should have gone straight home then—I would tell myself that a thousand times later—but I didn’t. Instead, I punished myself with liquor, pills and drugs as I had with increasing frequency and quantity since returning from Canton. But this night was different. Some semblance of humanity had returned to me in the studio, and it scared me. It was unfamiliar and I wanted to push it away. Near dawn, Trent dropped me off at home and I crept inside, fearful of waking Missi. But the bedroom light was on, and Missi was lying on her back on top of the bed, with no covers. She was shivering, but her skin was stippled with sweat, which had soaked into the sheets around her. She didn’t even acknowledge my presence: her eyes were rolled into the back of her head.
    I shook her and talked to her, placing a hand over her burning forehead. But she didn’t show any sign of consciousness. I cursed myself for not having come home sooner, for not having paid attention when Missi said earlier in the day she thought she was coming down with the flu, for not even bringing home the medicine she wanted, for all the times I had fought with her and cursed her existence in the past six months. And then I wondered if my own self-centered indulgence had killed her.
    She was the only person left for whom I was capable of feeling any love, and to lose her would be to destroy my only chance of returning to the normal human world of feelings, sentiments and passion—to destroy, in essence, myself.
    I panicked. Not only was I too fucked up to drive but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t because Missi’s car was a stick shift. Despite our recent differences, Trent was still the only person I could count on in New Orleans. I called his cell phone and, together, we rushed Missi to the hospital, the same one she had taken me to when I had overdosed. The nurses wheeled her into the emergency room and shot her with adrenaline to keep her alive. Her temperature was nearly 107 degrees, high enough to scramble the brains of most people. Several hours later, as the sun rose to signal the passing of another punishing day, two doctors brought Missi to the waiting room, where I sat with Trent still by my side. Trent didn’t need to be there: it wasn’t his responsibility. But there he was. Perhaps I had been wrong about Trent’s friendship lately. After all, in a lot of ways, over the past three years Trent had become the brother I never had.
    The doctors explained that Missi was three months pregnant and, if she decided to have an abortion, she would have to wait until her flu went away. I knew that during the course of our long relationship I had deformed her personality to suit my own. Now I realized that I had deformed her body as well.
    The next night, as I sat alone in the studio’s control room, I played back the rough mixes we had recorded of “Tourniquet,” a song inspired by one of my many apocalyptic nightmares. I thought I was listening to it to try and determine if it should be redone, but in reality I was trying to find myself in the song, to see if I could discover some clue, some answer, some solution, some way out of the mess my life and career had become. I listened to it again and again until I was numb to it, no longer able to tell if the song was good or bad, or even if it was my own or someone else’s. In a daze, I picked up the microphone plugged into