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Crash is sick. Not sick in the sense of nose running and blood, way it sometimes does after a hit off a mirror or the back of Ginger’s hand, hot skin and soft downy hairs that always throw him off for their softness, why the fuck are they soft? And not sick in the sense of withdrawal or DTs, neither, ‘cause he shot up only that morning and it did only its minimal best (efficacy forever decreasing, the trap of the nothing euphoria, that it gets increasingly less euphoric and also, towards the close, less nothing too) to make him feel any better, meaning here he is now sitting in this diner with a sniffle and a headache and a racking, fracturing cough trying to produce material that looks something near to what Morales’s eggs look like as he squirts ketchup and hot sauce all over them and stirs them into sludge.
“Fuck’s wrong with you,” Morales says. Crash twitches and grinds a hand into the sticky vinyl booth. Sensation does nothing to ground him. “Serious, Cohle, you must’ve lost twenty pounds since last time I saw you, which was maybe three fucking weeks ago, and you weren’t exactly a big guy then, neither, and also you look like you’re jonesing like a motherfucker.”
Not jonesing, Crash says, passing a thumb up the blotched lines in his forearm, his veins going dark and angry and racing around like trains derailed off tracks, bitching to each other, fuck does this guy think he is? Is he denying his programming, Crash wonders, or is he living it to its lasting extremity? Do they all live for this the way he does?
“Not jonesing. Fucking A. You worry me, hermano.”
Crash coughs. Glob of something lands in the palm of his hand — gluey, brown-red like old blood, shining in the shitty fluorescents overhead — and he inspects it with detachment.
Morales recoils. “You– you’re keeping it safe, though, right? With, y’know, needles and things. Your own and other people’s.”
Crash says, Can’t get you Miles yet, man, so if that’s what you’re wanting me for–
“Needles. You’re watching your needles, yeah? ‘Cause if a cop gets HIV sharing needles undercover — hell, it’s AIDS once you get to pneumonia, ain’t that right? If a cop gets AIDS–”
Don’t fucking exist, man. He lights a cigarette. Smoking it makes his lungs burn. Why’d you know so much about it?
“You been living your wild man shit these last three years but for us in the real world, working Narco on the right side of history, you can’t not know so much about it. Knowledge fucking forces itself on you. I got CIs dropping like flies, I got asshole troopers refusing to touch people in holding without rubber gloves. We get a guy all the way to his court date and then the judge grants him a stay because he’ll be dead before sentencing, AZT or no. That’s where sharing needles gets you. Whole fucking pile-on of shit, it’s a PR disaster, that’s what task force admin’s worried about. Been worried about for half a decade now.”
Since when’d you give a shit about PR or task force admin?
“I don’t. Figure it might sound better to you rather than me expressing real actual concern over what you’re doing to yourself here, since I know you don’t give a shit. Like I said, you worry me.”
Morales says this like he cares. He doesn’t care; he’s a weary, ass-scratching guy counting down the days til retirement, burnt coffee in the breakroom and racist jokes from the boys, on his second marriage and still paying the cash money consequences of the first. Splits his weekends between Crash and his kid, whom he refuses to talk about around Crash, and Crash likes this just fine. Morales has no incentive to care beyond base pay and overtime and right now he’s pulling his plate away as Crash coughs up another shred of lung. And Crash says, You gonna pull me?
And Morales says no. So.
Crash doesn’t keep it safe in any sense at all: Crash, determined in the nominative, does what Crash does. Lets Ginger fuck him without a rubber and swaps hypos with him for good measure. There are other men and women too, all itching for something, most scratching at track scabs. Crash might be dying of what he’s doing but, hey, ain’t everyone? He measures his days by lines and hits, pickups, stash house runs. His weekends by Morales or the lack of. Maybe Morales thinks it offers him again the illusion that he cares, goodness of his heart type of deal, seeing him outside hours, but really all it conveys is that the Texas DPS, Narco and DEA, are beginning on their inevitable slide towards forgetting what they ever wanted from him. As a body, he’s doing the same. Forgetting to eat and sleeping in chemical drift. Diminishing into parts of a dissolute whole and seeing something other than a person in Ginger’s bathroom mirror. Can’t get you Miles yet, man. Ginger is a sideline. Ginger is–
“What about this Ginger guy? Can you get him?”
Small fish, brother, I didn’t tell you that?
Morales, finished eating, looks at him closer. “You fucking high right now? That why you ain’t jonesing?”
Crash coughs. Denial is an admission of it, the need, the thing Morales, being too weary and too cowardly, won’t admit to being a need that belongs to him too because if Crash went clean, went back to another day and another name, then Morales’s wild junkie experiment would come to a premature close and this whole operation, named pitifully something like Saladin because Crusaders, because somebody read a fucking book and thought they were clever, this whole operation would be a waste of precious departmental expense accounts going on cigarettes and shitty diner eggs that Crash won’t eat. Meaning everybody needs Crash to need it. And, lucky for everybody, Crash does.
The cough wasn’t supposed to be an answer necessarily but it’s getting to be one because it ain’t coming to an end anytime soon, devolving into a hacking fit like what’s inside is threatening and cajoling and desiring its way into showing up on the outside instead, which, Crash ain’t too convinced about his own bodily integrity anyways. Morales watches him struggle to catch a breath and says, “Go to a fucking doctor, surely.”
Not to be dignified with an answer either. Crash leans his elbows on the scuffed laminate table and realizes it hurts to lean because there ain’t nothing but thin, ravaged skin between table and bone. Because maybe he’s not eating enough. Or all this is eating him.
“Ginger,” Morales says again. “Need something from you, man. Said you’d get the details for a meet, right? Something going down with Rebel? ‘Cause I need those details, or I need Ginger. You know they want blood every month. Full fucking moon.”
Ginger ain’t the fucking point of this.
“What is it with you and this guy, Cohle? Not like you don’t got the dirt.”
Miles ain’t my biggest fan. Without Ginger — coughs — without Ginger, reckon I’m lacking in leverage.
“You’re lacking in leverage. Okay.” Morales laughs, dry. “But you gotta work with me on Rebel. Which, do these white guys’ mamis really name them that shit? Or is that stupidity all of their own?”
You named me Crash.
“I inherited you as Crash. Blame some other fucker for that.” Morales takes a long swig of his coffee and signals the waitress, apron-clad, apple-cheeked, real Americana fantasy playing out as she tops him off and purses her cherry-red lips at the gray-skinned junkie sack of bones in the booth opposite this fine upstanding citizen. She doesn’t offer him any pie. Morales waves her off and says, “C’mon, Cohle, don’t got all day. This meet with Rebel you mentioned last time.”
The thing is, Crash wakes up most days on a mattress he doesn’t know where he got it from; invariably, he’s in a marinating pool of his own sweat in the literal sense while also sinking and sliding metaphorically across some seductive body of liquid that ain’t quite water, too viscous, too thick, and each time he does that, wake up, he’s glad because it means he’s not dreaming but he’s also not unconvinced he never wakes up at all, that each day is a further concentric circle of dream, like hell, like a deepening whirlpool of blood and shit and this mucus stuff he can’t seem to stop coughing up. Thing is, forgetting to eat ain’t an outlier so much as an indicator of less basic forgettings as well, pyramid of fucking needs, seems his subconscious has made the decision for him. Erase it all, top down, eradicate all needs until there’s only one need, the Need, the grasping pull of purple dark like oblivion’s made of pretty fucking flowers. The Need that will kill him. And he’s three years in. He thinks he’s three years in.
Meaning: I ain’t got the details.
“What?” Morales looks like a cartoon when he’s surprised, genuinely surprised. Eyes go big and buggy. Crash can’t think about cartoons; he lights another cigarette, starts coughing on the inhale, breathes with the feeling there’s a little arsonist running around his alveoli. “The fuck you mean, you ain’t got them? Listen, you’re a crazy fucking junkie and everybody knows it, but what gets you through is that you always fucking deliver. Without fail. You got the goods, Cohle, you think you’d be any use to anyone if you didn’t have the goods? Shit, you must really be sick. Do I gotta get your bloods done?”
Mighta got them, Crash mutters. Mighta– don’t know. Don’t remember.
Morales sits back. “You don’t remember.”
It ain’t– last couple weeks, it’s been–
“Was I not clear enough just now, huh? You’re only an asset so long as you ain’t a liability. The getting high shit, it serves us, sure, believe me, I had that fucking argument with the higher-ups and got it drilled into me that it serves us, but only so long as it serves us, comprende? This ain’t an all inclusive druggie sleepaway camp. You’re at fucking work.”
Thing is, Crash doesn’t remember much of the last few weeks at all. Only enough that comprende awakens something in him, something like a liability, like prey, and the second his breathing picks up the coughing comes back with the blood in his throat and he hacks and spits and lands something truly ugly on the table, ears ringing, Morales pushing back, Morales an anchor in a storm trying ever so fucking hard to cut its chain to the fragile little boat above. Crash knows why he has pneumonia. Hell, maybe he’s got the virus, too, but there are things all more immediate than that, like choking on dirty water with a hand heavy on the back of his head.
Localized offshoot of a cartel straddling the border (does he say this out loud? He’s not at this point clear) meaning not the bad shit, the bad shit but not the bad shit, as in yeah they’ll likely still nail you on the floor and dice your balls like scallions so you can swallow them before you choke on your own dick but that’s only after they’re certain you done what they say you done, which, ‘course, takes them some creative methods to get to that conclusion, what you might call torture only they ain’t government or state but they may as well be, terms of controlling a territory and managing it under their own laws, which they do have them, laws, one of which being you don’t trust any white man in track marks and leather. And so he’s not even sure what they were trying to wring outta him, or how they picked him up, or why, only a long term of dull nothing and then his whole head dunked in a bathtub filled up special for that purpose. Only they’re in a nice little town doesn’t get clean water, state governance being state governance, begs the question why they’re all marching off to war against drugs when a guy can’t even get tortured in clean water. Why ain’t Nancy Reagan talking about that one, huh?
He remembers water. He remembers the hand on his head digging its nails into his skull, remembers the weight heavy almost flush behind him, pushing him down. Remembers the ache of the rim of the bathtub and he’s still got the long wide bruise rotting yellow across his clavicles to show for it, bones edging out from under his skin like trying to escape the stain. Convulsing on shitty tiles, the floor, sucking in air, retching out water. Dirty water. One of them kicking him in the spine: we keep doing this til you tell us, comprende?
Doesn’t know what they wanted him to tell. Doesn’t think they cared.
And then–
(This part he certainly doesn’t tell Morales)
If they’re going all-out on the war metaphor then in the doorway, shining knight on his own personal crusade, Ginger blasting heads open with a sawed-off shotgun. Crash, damsel, still shaking, cartel guys’ brains splattering all over. Crash managing, Fuck are you doing here.
And Ginger grinning, Here to kill you or them. Either way, ain’t nobody knowing about the meet with Rebel. I happen to like it better this way. It being them and not you.
Crash, staggering out dripping water and blood. Ginger’s hand ghosting, proprietal, over the nodes of his spine. Not knowing the Mexico fuckers did him a favor, erasing all knowledge of Rebel and detail and meet from Crash’s fucked-out head. Not there to tell Morales nor nobody else. He thinks they had him three days but he can’t be sure. He thinks he’s probably twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight. He thinks it’s been going on four years since Sophia but, again, he doesn’t fucking know, and he ain’t the one needs to know. Crash doesn’t memorize dates. Doesn’t elegize or litanize, fucks around, develops pneumonia. Doesn’t, apparently, remember things.
Night before the meet with Morales, Ginger pulls him into the bathroom, twitchy off a fresh line and rabid with it, sinking his teeth into the base column of Crash’s neck like there’s anything there currently but sweat and loose skin. Gets like this when there’re people around. Other side of the wall Sultan and Mitch are floating around some new LSD vibe meaning they wouldn’t know a Martian from their mother and Ginger’s more interested in feeling out the bony planes of Crash’s ass through his jeans. Ginger gets like this when Crash isn’t like this; they take their turns. Crash gets like this when he needs something. Ginger, which is a consequence Crash shoulda foreseen but is getting to know how to use, gets like this when Crash betrays too little of that need. Which is the brunt of Crash’s existence, as discussed: Need that drags at him, cloying, headiest lotus perfume. Floral fucking garden. Adam, Eve, serpent, and Ginger pushing Crash into a wall, tugging at his belt. Wanna fuck you right here, Ginger mouths out, wanna do it where they don’t even fucking know–
Crash is up too. Meaning his eyes are darting over tile and light, humming throb too loud and too bright like first winter snow amid an oil spill, can only taste chemical out here, tile and light and bathtub–
Coke means he coughs less, some reason, means he can shudder in a breath too shallow without doubling over and means Ginger can dispense with his belt buckle and the buttons on his fly, too, hand on waist to turn him around–
Bathtub. Crash halts and would push away only there ain’t nowhere to go and he pants, suddenly, sweats like he’s a running horse at Sam Houston. I ain’t–
Ain’t what? Ginger asks, not really asking, wolfish smile. Gets like this on coke. Manic, better than meth, meth that strips any reason away entirely. What, you saying you don’t like me no more?
Ginger.
Ginger turns him around. Easy to do, being that Crash is running a fever and weighs something less than he should, though Ginger’s shorter, but Ginger’s solider and Ginger turns him around with a heavy hand on his hip. Ginger says, hot breath, back of his neck, You don’t want my protection no more?
Crash inhales. Exhales. Edge of phlegm rattles in his chest like death, like a fucking infant’s toy. Looks away from the bathtub and feels the pale softness of Ginger’s hands, the broad Texas of his accent, whittling whine of coke still in his ears: whether he wants it or not. The Need has a gaping purple maw and it needs to be fucking fed. He pushes his ass back against Ginger’s coke-led hard-on and Ginger purrs, There you are.
“Cohle,” Morales is saying. “Cohle, Rust, fuck, can you hear me? Rust?”
Rust is still in here somewhere but it’s Crash who twitches on the floor, brings his knees up to curl defensive around his middle, knowing in an abstract way all he did was fall out of the booth when everything went gray and he’s been doing that lately, microdosing oblivion, cheaper and more effective high than horse–
“Cohle.”
“Is he alright?”
“Sir, can you–“
“Cohle?”
When he opens his eyes there are lights streaming all around him, vivid, glaring lights, hundreds of lights, the brutal-seeking eyes of cold star angels. People argue if hell is fire or ice but right now Crash is passing through both, shivering more like shaking while his whole body burns. He closes his eyes again.
“I’m gonna call an–“
“Don’t call nobody. I’m a cop. I’ll take him to Urgent Care.”
“Surely he needs the–“
Morales won’t take him to the Emergency Room because there’s a higher chance of recognition in the Emergency Room, bikers and junkies being the sort to get shot and stabbed and otherwise maimed, not the sort to tend to any need that doesn’t bleed. Safest would be a methadone clinic, because anyone with an order or a hankering to quit is already long outta the game, but Morales takes him to Urgent Care. Drifts someplace out of his body along the way, comes to the awareness of cold medical air in sick green, green somehow chlorinated and sharp-bitten, unforgiving. Morales, pinching the bridge of his nose: “I really don’t wanna let them sedate you, Cohle, so you’re gonna need to let them touch you, okay?”
Time spent waiting. Coughing. Growing sicker. Crash wonders if he still has medical insurance and then casts the wondering aside. Morales, opening his wallet, least he could do. Crash already on his back.
When the doctor comes back he talks about T cells in a way that makes Morales slump back, cartoonish relief. “You’re still a very sick man, Mr. Cohle. This is a serious case of community-acquired pneumonia, which can turn into sepsis if left untreated —” and other such things Crash only idly listens to, like getting him into an inpatient facility or if nothing else referring him to a methadone clinic, it really does help, Mr. Cohle, this could be the first big step in getting your life back–
“Thank you, Doctor,” Morales says. “I’ll make sure he keeps it in mind.”
Handful of antibiotics; Morales takes him nowhere else but Morales’s own fucking apartment, which is a cluttered one-bed ten minutes away from the station, showcasing nothing so much as an obsession with his work and an equitable inability to throw shit away. Crash, slung on the junk-piled couch to sweat it out, fits right in. Excuse: “My mom died a couple months ago, we sold the house but not– y’know, not the things.”
Crash says, Fuck am I doing here.
Morales says, “Sweating it out.”
Don’t want to see your fucking wife, man.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah, she and I, we’re on the outs. Taking some time apart, some shit. Doesn’t get on with my–“
He stops. Kid disseminates, saccharine-blue, in the air anyway.
He clears his throat. “Glad you don’t got AIDS, hermano. That would be very fucking bad.”
Crash says something about counting his fucking chickens. And then, you don’t want me going dopesick on your fucking couch. Figure this junkie soul might separate from body entirely if it don’t get certain chemicals right on schedule.
“Fucking Christ, Cohle.”
That guy ain’t got nothing to do with it.
Crash still can’t light a cigarette without coughing, makes everything light up inside him like tattered shards of Christmas. The angel lights have stopped looking at him but he can feel them waiting. He reckons he’s got two days before Ginger misses him, two days before Ginger wants another hit, right on schedule. Maybe two hours before he himself starts to itch with it, the Need. He just looks at Morales and Morales looks at him.
“Fuck,” Morales says finally. “Yeah. Okay.”
Which is how, two hours later, Crash winds up contemplating Morales’s bathroom and bathtub, eyes stinging and body thrumming with wound-up tension, ache from the pneumonia or ache from the Need? Ache from the hand that was on the back of his head?
He is more than that, he decides, more than convulsing with water in his lungs as they ask him questions they don’t want answers to, but he is not more than this. More than this: sitting dry in the bathtub with his sleeves rolled up, probing for an uncollapsed vein.
Later — gone through blissful nothing and out the other side, back to being a body and of a body and what that fucking means, mainly the throbbing burn of his chest when he breathes and the shivery sweat tracking down his spine somewhere close to the touch of a lover, itself a kind of horror these days — he’s fixing to steal outta there like a lady of the night, only Morales is sitting up on the couch, smoking and swirling whiskey around his dead mom’s crystalline tumbler. Crash leans unsteady in the doorway and says, I ain’t giving you Ginger, apropos of nothing. Apropos of air. The antibiotics are big and chalky and he ain’t supposed to drink on them, which means he can, because they don’t give drug addicts pills they can’t drink on.
“I know,” Morales says.
Yeah.
A silence. Morales ain’t looking at him; Morales is looking out across the crowded room, across boxes and books and sideboards, things people own. Sad little things like a cuckoo clock, a decorative birdcage. Family photos faded out by the sun. There’s a kid’s drawing framed on the bathroom wall, parrot feathers in wobbly red crayon. Crash looked at it as he faded out and for a moment there in the purple dark he was Rust again, and Rust was a scrappy shred of agony in a body that didn’t belong to him, pleading to be forgotten, demanding it, I am not here I am not here I am not — and then he was nothing at all.
Thanks, Crash says. Words thin and ill-used.
Morales is still looking into the middle distance, into the gloom. Telegraphing forever his intentions on his face: tonight he is haunted. “Don’t fucking thank me.”
Yeah, fuck you. Don’t owe you shit.
“Nope.” Morales raises the whiskey to his lips. Says into it, “Work on Rebel, okay? Two weeks, give me something I can use.”
Crash salutes. Coughs into the dope-bitten crease of his elbow. Then walks right back out into the dark.