The nurse arrived two days after Hutchinson Hospital sent my mother home. The nurse's name was Mary. She wore the hospice badge pinned to her blouse; she was strong enough to carry, by herself, the bathroom supplies and the skeletal, white-sheeted bed. She had no idea the number of days I hadn't slept. No idea how every hour I kept slipping into the bathroom to crush, on the basin above the meds and hospital bedpans, another glistening white line of meth. Had she caught me, I might have called it "the magic getting me through the nights and days," as if she understood.
     Mary stepped into the room with an orange soda in her left hand and a bottle of morphine in her right. She asked me to sign a form that specified I was the primary caregiver. "Let me take over just a few hours," she said. "I bet you've been here for days straight. Right? Have you even eaten?"
     "Sure." I jerked a thumb toward the kitchen to try and prove myself. "There's food."
     "Why don't you head into the city. Always lots of sales at the mall! We'll make sure her slumber's a peaceful one." Her tone was slow and bruised, as though all of this had happened to me, not my mother.
     "The mall's a good idea," I said, and stepped to the bed. Her toes had stiffened cold as pebbles, and I wrapped them in the pink baby blanket. I unfolded the quilt and tucked it beneath her legs. The quilt was antique and frayed; she had bought it at an estate sale after a neighbor had died. Its meandering red and white pattern, she'd told me once, was called "drunkard's path." I remember thinking how maudlin that sounded, how sad.
     I wanted to tell Mary these details but didn't. Her hands were busy with my mother. Mary wore a sapphire ring and her fingernails were immaculate, though not painted, as that would have been too much. I watched as she delicately administered the morphine. The five brown drops struck my mother's gums and pooled below her tongue. Mary stepped back and nodded. I saw the lips clap together and the throat struggle a bit, struggling with the drug. The eyelids, the same pale drawn lids as mine, trembled but stayed slumberingly shut.
     In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face. I scrubbed a washrag under my arms and tried to erase the sweat from my crotch and ass. Morphine was the opposite of crystal meth but seeing its effect on the

shell of her made me want something equally potent. I did a little more for the road; sniffed water to clear my nose. Smiling, I said a fourth thank-you to Mary, bolted, and turned the grumbling ignition of my mother's pickup.
     Fuck the mall, I thought. I headed northwest, toward a place where I could settle the desires the drug had raised. I wanted to be kissed and roughed up by someone, wanted the teeth and knees of him, I wanted to blank my mind. According to the pickup's foldout road map (a red-inked anonymous address, in my mother's handwriting, was scrawled across the Kansas border), the park in Hutchinson lay fifteen miles away. I hadn't been there in years, and wondered if men still cruised for sex, shadowed in the yellow trees beside the yellower river.
     The welcome sign; the duck pond; the cottonwoods already spilling their leaves. I circled the nine-hole golf course, the playground with its broken swing sets and corroded corkscrew slides. The radio static ably accompanied the dismal sky. On the truck's passenger floor was an empty fast-food cup (surely from one of my mother's strawberry shakes) and a used prescription bottle (Rituxan, I guessed, maybe Anzemet). In the sideview mirror, half a mile back, another car coasted the same road. Up ahead, where the asphalt turned to soft-shouldered mud, two cars had parked beside the path. This place never changes.
     I pulled behind the cars and softly shut the door. The path was soft and peppered with tiny glittering stones; the tangled scrub grew thicker as I headed into the trees. Years had passed since I'd been here, done this. Back then I was just a kid, early twenties maybe, and the mere idea of secret sex would leave me shivering. Right now my shakes came only from the drug.
     Two minutes into the wood, just before the river's rim, I saw the boy. Nineteen at most, I guessed. He stood beneath a tree, leaning against the black bark, his gaze on the ground. His eyes and mouth were pinched, curious yet intent, so intent, the tree could be a lamp illuminating words written on the earth . . . In the moment I took to think that, I moved soundlessly closer.
     The boy's skin was pale as paper. His hair hung long, unwashed and uncombed. Two hoops pierced each earlobe; another poked from the wet crook of his bottom lip. His jeans were unzipped and pulled down, exposing part of his legs, an arc of pubic hair. He wore a T-shirt, perhaps the logo of some local band. Against the black, a leering white skull; below it, the words THE DYING BREATHS.
     From upriver, the wind carried unmistakable smells from a farm, the damp sorghum, the post-harvest corn cribs, the cattle. I breathed the wind into my head and moved nearer. He still hasn't noticed me, I thought, and as I took another sideways step I realized we weren't alone, realized what was happening. Behind the boy, kneeling, his face buried in the boy's ass, was a thin, gray-haired, frantically masturbating man.
     Comically, as though in a terrible film, a stick cracked beneath my step. The boy startled and saw me. He wore a smudge of mascara but still I noticed the luminous green of his eyes. Immediately they squinted, belligerent; then they softened. I think perhaps he liked the look of me. With his back canted slightly, his ass still the goal of the man's sloppy attention, he gestured his head: come join us.
     At this he lowered his jeans farther, flirting. By now I should have been hard, but wasn't. Once upon a time, sex had been my sheer incentive for crystal meth; once upon, the drugs had sharpened and inflamed me. Once upon I would have rushed for this boy and pressed him hard into the tree and pressed my tongue into his mouth and forgotten the other man behind him.
     But I had been hooked for too long. Instead I felt dulled, blanked. What I thought I wanted wasn't

possible from the husk I'd become. My thoughts seemed to hover, not quite connected to my head, and as I shuffled toward him I offered my hand not to reach in his jeans, not to push the man's face deeper inside him, but rather as introduction. His fingers touched mine, and we shook. "Scott," I told him.
     "Lucan," he said. I wanted to laugh but only smiled. Indeed he had the eyes of a wolf; indeed his scruffy sideburns and mussed brown hair fit the name.
     The older man still hadn't budged. I heard the grizzle and the slop of his mouth. Lucan pulled my face toward his; the skull T-shirt carried a smokiness, and the skin beneath smelled musty, muddy, as though he had spent nights lying on, even in, the earth.
     He slid a hand down my back and cupped it over my ass. He tried to kiss me. I cocked my head slightly and deflected, resting my cheek against his, lowering to his neck, breathing the pale skin beneath his ear. I breathed so deeply it burned. I smelled a teenage spice-cologne smell and remembered it dabbed, back then, on my own neck: a square bottle of amber liquid, a bottle my mother bought, a cologne she had loved and wanted me to wear.
     The boy pulled at my zipper. He would find nothing there. Through the trees past the river were the lifeless rock quarry, the bone-white stretches of Hutchinson's grain elevators. Somewhere overhead drifted the wing-heaving slap of water birds. His hand moved across me, persistent. I thought of the drug in my veins and my hollow, damaged desire, and with one hand slowly rezipped. The boy bent his eyebrows in protest, but I couldn't continue with him.
     As I stepped back, he slapped his hand on my ass again. His insistence suddenly repulsed me, and I pulled away farther. I patted his shoulder, looked down at the skull on his shirt, then back into his eyes. Softly, so the man behind him wouldn't hear, I whispered the words: "The dying breaths."
     He smiled, his mouth suddenly uneven and ugly. "Yeah," he said.
     I walked backwards, then spun and ran, through the branches and weeds to the truck. The interior felt warmer than before. Once again, I could smell her. Back home she lay erased in the hospice bed, erased beside Mary and all the years of antiques and the photos of my sister and me. But I could smell her; she was here, now, too.
     Along the curves of the park, as I continued home, the pickup made sinister knocking noises. I only drove faster. I took deep breaths from the window, speeding, defying the sodden roads where tire tracks of blur-eyed drunks had scarred the mud. And there, at the roadside ahead, in a gravel driveway, stood two white-blond children, a boy and a thinner, taller girl. They stood behind a giant sign. LEMONADE.
     I slowed and nudged my elbow out the window. Obviously the kids had made the sign, yellow marker on white cardboard, barely readable in the lowering sunlight. They seemed thrilled to see me pausing at their ramshackle stand; now I had to stop. My heart clutched and stuttered with meth speed but my sight

was still clear and I could see the lemonade's pale color, pale lemon, almost gray. I could see their ragged smiles; the grime in the maps of their palms. The thought of the lemonade in my mouth made me feeble with thirst. "I'll take a really large glass," I told them.
     The ice was shaped like crescents and it cracked as they poured. In my wallet I still had a twenty. It was the last of the twenties my mother had given me, five days ago, that last day she was able to stand or move. She had slipped me the bills so I could continue buying her favorite strawberry shakes: no matter what fast-food drive-through I could find, those shakes were all she wanted—one daily, maybe two — just make sure they're frothy and cold, she said, with bright-colored straw. She loved their sweet berry bite and she loved the straw. That was all she asked for, before she stopped asking and speaking.
     I was not fulfilling her wish. I had spent the money on myself. I worried that I would retrieve the last twenty and, delivering it to the blond children, find it stuck with damp hairs from my mother's head, with her steroid skin cream, with even her vomit or the flecks of blood she'd spat up that very morning, inky and thick as coffee grounds.
     But when I checked my back pockets, my wallet was missing. I tried my jacket; I tried the truck's floor. Nothing. The boy, I realized — Lucan — had stolen my money, my photographs, all my proofs and identifications.
     "You don't have nothing to give us, do you," the boy said. He looked about ten, and his sister, twelve. "You want our lemonade, but you haven't got nothing."
     "Just a while ago I did," I said. "I did have some money."
     The boy stepped around the stand and took two stomps toward the truck. Now he looked even younger than ten, but his fists had curled against his hips and he stood as tall as my open window. "I did," I repeated, "but somebody took it."
     In a flash the boy lifted a fist and made a single comical punch against the side-view mirror. Its glass split with a diagonal crack; the mirror tilted to show, for an instant, the smudgy sky.
     I took my foot from the brake and accelerated. The truck coughed forward, gravel spraying. I raised the window to shut out their voices. Before it closed, I caught them laughing; I caught the boy's voice, so wild and gorgeous and alive, repeating nothing, nothing, nothing.
     As I drove, I knew that had my mother been with me, she would feel amused by this entire afternoon. She would have poked me in the ribs. She would have teased me about Lucan and the lemonade; would have called to cancel my cards; would have asked, What's it going to take to make you conquer it?
     Nothing, I thought, could make me conquer mine, either. Soon it would be dark; soon there would be stars. I sped back to the faded town, the house, the room filling softly with my mother's breaths.
     Eight more miles, according to her foldout map. Seven, then six, then five. After a while, I wanted to be touched again. Wanted more of the drug. After a while, the static on the radio faded forward into the hint of a song. I tried to focus. I could follow its melody, but I couldn't understand the words. n°

©2004 Scott Heim and Nerve.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Scott Heim is the author of the novels Mysterious Skin and In Awe. He is finishing a third, We Disappear. The film version of Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki, will be released this year.