fiction by Jason Edwards
Groggy. When you’re in Vegas you’re either having fun, or groggy. Chance is standing in front of the bathroom mirror, filling his water bottle from the sink. His hair is a mess, going every which way. His five-o’clock shadow is verging on quarter of six. His sweat-stained t-shirt hangs limp on his shoulders. His pajama bottoms are twisted to one side. He chugs from the bottle. Sometime in the middle of the night he got a wicked cramp on the inside of his thigh, something that had never happened to him before. He didn’t know whether to be amused or terrified. The rest of the night it was difficult to sleep.
Not that it had been easy when he’d gone to bed at 2 am. An early night in Vegas. He’d been groggy then too, too tired to sleep. Chance finishes off the bottle, pulls a face at the aftertaste, starts to refill the bottle, changes his mind. Vegas tap water is horrible, unlike the water in Portland, and even worse than Los Angeles. Of course, Every time he’s in LA, he gets sick, thanks to that damn baby, so maybe it’s viruses and not water he’s tasting when he’s there.
He sets the empty bottle down next to the sink, returns to the bed, tries to crawl in, gets confounded by the sheets. They’re twisted up worse than his pajama bottoms, worse than his t-shirt. All the fabrics in his life, currently, a conspiracy of twisting and binding. He should get naked, lie on the floor, and let the AC freeze him into a block of ice. He’ll leave a note, requesting to be thawed out when they’ve either outlawed water altogether, or made it such that water everywhere tastes exactly the same.
Eventually he makes sense of warp and weave, becomes ensconced, as it were. He starts to giggle, thinking about the word. He’s not drunk, not anymore, and isn’t there something about alcohol causing dehydration? Which can cause cramps? But Chance has been drunk before, plenty of times, several times in this Las Vegas visit alone. Never smashed. Never blotto. Just mildly drunk, that Vegas kind of drunk, that I-don’t-really-have-to-care-about-anything-for-a-few-days kind of drunk. No hangovers to speak of. Paradise, frankly.
Chance feels his hand flailing about on the bedside table before he realizes why. Is the phone ringing? Did some idiot set the alarm in his absence? A joke played on him by one of the maids, retaliation in advance for requiring that they thaw him out of an air-condition-induced block of ice? Then his hand finds a remote of some kind and his groggy thumb is pressing a button to close the blinds. The shaft of light that had threatened him is vanquished.
He can now return to sleep, to dream of strippers and prime rib and sick babies covered in snot and howling while his brother laughs and makes him hold it a little while longer. No, wait, what? Damn it, not that. Strippers and prime rib and hot streak at the craps table and a great big hot bottle of oily water pressing down on his stomach. Damn it all. He needs to take a leak again. Stupid water.
Chance rolls to the side of the bed, is caught up in the sheets, tries to twist as he feels himself fall, and right as he’s balanced on the edge of the bed, precarious, the cramp hits him again, worse this time, bringing not only excruciating pain but the memory of the earlier edition. What the everloving fuck. But there’s no question of being amused or terrified this time. It’s sheer terror. His leg is being simultaneously squeezed and stretched. He’s weightless, there’s a sharp white light inside his head, and now he’s on the floor, with what he’s sure is a bed-side-table-top-corner-shaped hole in his skull. Neither pain seems interested in distracting the other. His bladder joins in with a selfish reminder. Strippers, prime rib, a really shitty Elvis impersonator, yelling at his brother that he was going to sneeze so take the damn baby and his brother giving him that look for using such language in front of an infant literally younger than the fucking diaper he was filling.
He’s moving, he’s out of the sheets, he’s on his feet, he’s limping, he’s in the bathroom, he’s turning on the light and daring it to hurt his eyes. The light decides to be just a mildly annoying glare. He’s pissing and teetering and finishing and waggling and replacing. Chance reaches for the water bottle to fill it and it smacks it instead and it ricochets off the mirror and onto the floor. His girlfriend would be mortified. A water bottle on a bathroom floor. The horror.
How long are you going to be in LA, she said, standing there in the smallest kitchen in Portland, filling and refilling a tiny glass of water from her sink. A week, Chance said. And at the time, it might have been true. Maybe he really would have stayed to visit his brother and his spawn for a whole week if it hadn’t been so non-strippers and non-prime rib and non-Texas Hold ‘em.
Chance leans over and cups his hand under the faucet, lets the water run and sips straight from his palm. The aftertaste is becoming a while-he’s-still swallowing-taste. His brother, in LA, handing him a glass of luke-warm water from the tap. No more bottled water, Chance, he said. My baby needs fluoride. Seriously, you can only stay two days? She’s got you on that short of a leash bro? Yes, if by she he meant Roxxi Diamonds, or Bessie, or Lady Luck.
He feels a sneeze coming on, swallows sort of hard, gets a painful lump in his throat. Straightens up, goes a little woozy. Forgets he’s going to sneeze. Why is my body rebelling against me? Looks into the bathroom light, violently sneezes, but it’s one of those stunted sneezes that hurts more than anything.
Not enjoying this. Nope, not one bit. Supposed to be a vacation. Supposed to be getting away from the nagger and the bully. He sits down on the commode. Carefully, in case it’s actually a hole over a 15-story pit. So he lied, so what, everyone lies. Sometimes the truth is worse. Everything’s relative, right? It’s not like he’s slept with the strippers, or even touched them very much, wasn’t in love with them, didn’t want to have a relationship with them, they were barely even people, and that’s just the way they liked it, they didn’t want creeps getting all personal on them. So, the lap dances were a kind of lie that’s a truth, a good one, an alternate reality, a better world.
So what. So you go to a steak house and order prime rib and they bring it to you and you eat it. You don’t need it, you want it. The nutrition is superfluous. The thousand bucks lost on the Trailblazers game? What else was that money going to be used for, in the long run? So what? Lies are better. Chance loved his girlfriend so much he was willing to sacrifice the holy truth and not tell her what an annoying bitch she could be, most of the time. He loved his brother enough to put up with a screaming baby and not dump it in the garbage can for the slime-covered piece of shit that it was. Chance earned this trip, deserved it, was required by natural law to be here and to have a little fun to chase the noose away.
So don’t give me anymore shit, he says, standing up and looking down at his body. His sweat-stained t-shirt hanging limp on his shoulders, his pajama bottoms twisted to one side.
Fifteen stories below, a pressure valve that was supposed to have been turned off due to a failed inspection, but wasn’t because the inspector’s daughter needed braces and the hotel superintendent always kept a stack of incentive-chips in his pockets, registers Chances’ complaint, and decides to help. The faucet starts to rattle, vigorously, making the entire counter shake. The handle flies off the top, spouting water, and before Chance can move, the faucet itself bursts, flying right at him and hitting him in the leg. Right where he had the cramp.
Chance falls to the floor, is immediately soaked. Water geysers, shorting out the light. In the darkness, the water rises. Chance tries to swallow it. It doesn’t taste so bad.
EWWWW!