The Sweet Forever

Dimitri Karras leaned forward from his seat on the couch. He used his single-edge blade to lengthen the long line on the mirror. He moved the snow back and forth, making it longer with each stroke. He loved to play with the stuff; sometimes he thought the ritual was the best part of doing coke.

Donna Morgan stood in the center of the room, moving to No Free Lunch, the Green on Red EP that Karras had thrown on the turntable. While Donna danced, she stared at the Miami Vice episode playing silently on the television. Karras thought it funny — ironic, he would have said in his teaching days — that a nation of coke-using young people watched this show every Friday night, religiously following the exploits of these stylish undercover cops. Karras would have said something to Donna about it, but she wouldn’t have heard him. The music was up too loud.

They had come back to Karras’s apartment at 1841 R Street, nicknamed the Trauma Arms by its earlier residents, after Karras had stopped for a twelve-pack of Heinekens. Karras wasn’t a power drinker normally, but when he did coke he had a bottomless thirst. Lately he’d been drinking quite a bit. There were five dead soldiers on the table in front of him.

“Here, baby,” said Karras when he’d caught Donna’s eye.

He watched her walk to the couch. She had taken off her sweater and now had just a white T-shirt tucked into her skirt. Like everyone else these days, partiers and health nuts alike, she had a tight body. Karras could remember the freckles on her chest, the dark nipples hung like plums on her smallish, hard white breasts. He tried not to think of them or the rest of her. He wanted to party some more, not rush the night.

Donna used a twenty, tightly rolled and taped, to hoover the line. There was a cigarette burning in the ashtray and one still smoking where she had butted it out.

“All right,” Donna said, dipping her fingers in the glass of water on the table, putting the wet fingers in her nose. She took a bottle of beer off the table.

Karras sang along to the record: “ ‘Time ain’t nothin’ when you’re young at heart, and your soul still burns...’ ”

“Yeah!” said Donna.

Karras did half his line into one nostril, half into the other. He dumped some more coke from Donna’s snow-seal onto the mirror.

As the music ended, Donna said, “You got any U2?”

“Uh-uh.”

“What?”

“I saw them at the Ontario on the Boy tour, and then at Ritchie in College Park to make sure I wasn’t missing something. The audience was in black leather, all of them pumping their fists in the air at once. It looked like Berlin in thirty-eight.”

“You’d know, ’cause you were, like, hanging out in Nazi Germany in thirty-eight.”

“Look, I just don’t get it.”

“Whaddya wanna hear, then?”

“Keep on goin’ with that Paisley Underground thing. Put on some Dream Syndicate.”

“Which one?”

“Medicine Show,” said Karras. “A Sandy Pearlman production.”

“Huh?”

“Guy who produced that record produced early BOC. Also did that Clash record, Give Em Enough Rope.”

It was all speed now, Karras knew. His mouth was overloading his asshole. He was spouting useless shit just to hear his own voice.

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“Go ahead and put on that Dream Syndicate, Donna.”

A couple of beers and several lines later, Karras was in the center of the room air-guitaring the “Merrittville” solo. He caught his reflection in the window, a gray-haired guy running his fingers down an imaginary fret.

“What’s so funny?” said Donna.

“Funny? I feel good, that’s all.”

“I feel good, too.”

She’d reached her peak, a kind of desperate and deluded happiness in her eyes. Her smile was glued open. She looked blown out.

Karras wanted more. The time between jolts was getting shorter, and more was all he could think of now.