MURIEL

Muriel died on Sunday. It had been six years since I had seen her. Maybe more. I can’t remember exactly. We had spent a week together with friends in a rented single-story bungalow on the coast of Maine. The house had a crushed-shell driveway and sliding-glass doors that looked out over the ocean and wood paneling inside which was a sandy blonde color. There was a plaid couch and cots instead of beds and limewashed stones arranged in the shape of a star in the front yard. It rained all weekend and the glass doors wobbled whenever the wind got heavy. We played board games and did puzzles and watched movies together, and later Muriel cooked a skillet margherita pizza with tomato sauce and a bubbly crust, and we drank watermelon-cucumber-mint iced tea out of mason jars and talked about where we would go on vacation next.

That was the last time I saw her in person. About a month ago, I received a voicemail from her:

It’s Muriel. I know it’s been a while since we talked. I heard you were in London. I hope you like it there. You should come back sometime. We miss you. I went home for a while and stayed with my parents, but I got kicked out. I’m selling my artwork now and I’m in the program. I’m clean almost two months now. I’m on step nine. Making amends. I figured I owed you a call. If you get this, please call me back. I wasn’t sure if I still had the right number.

I didn’t call her. I convinced myself this was a pragmatic decision. Muriel obviously needed money and had by now alienated her other friends and family members. I had once been in the same position as her (although I had eventually got sober without the help of any program), which, in my mind, qualified me to make the “tough love” decision. That was what I told myself, at least.

* * *

On Tuesday, I got a call from Nathan, a friend I knew around the same time. Actually, we weren’t really friends, but we had a lot of friends in common. He was a year younger than me. I hadn’t had contact with him in years, except once, when I was visiting home and saw one of his checks hanging in a convenience store.

“Didja miss me?” he asked.

Even over the phone I could hear he was grinning.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You heard about Muriel?”

“Yeah.”

“Some shit, huh?”

“Yep.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“About five years ago.”

“Did she remember you?”

I didn’t answer.

“You alright?”

“Did you call just to tell me about her?”

“Uh-huh,” he said cheerfully.

* * *

I kept remembering things Muriel had said or done. We used to go out and sit in the courtyard of the housing complex where her friend lived in Baltimore on cold mornings, where there was a couch in the yard and we would split blunts and soda cups. In the bright air, I looked up and saw a flock of birds that convulsed and spiraled and moved like a liquid, gliding together. Her hair was flowing in long, autumnal tresses on her shoulders. It was freezing out. My balls were ice-cold.

I remember going out and scoring with her. Hanging around all-night cafeterias and pool halls and subway stations waiting for dealers. Getting dopesick together. Her roommates yelling that the spoons in the apartment were black. I remember going up on the roof of our apartment building, and for miles in every direction you could see the thin tracings of the staccato skyline against the clouds. It was raining softly.

“We’re pretty high up,” I said.

I could hear a throb of helicopter rotors overhead.

“What would you do if I fell?” she asked.

I stammered.

“Well – I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d go crazy. I’d die if I never got to see you again.”

Her head cocked, as if responding to something far away.

“And what about me?” I asked, “What would you do if I fell?”

She smiled.

“I’d rip my eyes out and hit myself in the face and cut off my arms and jump in a lake.”

“Well, I’d lie down in the street and wait for a car to come.”

“I’d kneel down and French-kiss the third rail on the subway.”

We both nodded.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“So let’s promise.”

“We won’t fall.”

* * *

There were times when Muriel was literally all I thought about. Being around her was the only thing I enjoyed. Going to shitty parties and hiding pills inside coffee cans and buying eyedroppers at drugstores and smoking and fucking and camping out in sleeping bags on the floor.

We tried to make it work for a while. Muriel was from the Midwest, and her parents were middle-class. But she was a fuck-up and never went to school. Later, she came out to the East Coast and got an apartment in Philadelphia. In her bedroom, there was a ceramic Buddha with a stick of incense lodged in its lap. I spent a lot of time there. She used to play LPs on the record player in the corner.

She was found dead in that room on December 4th at 12:32 pm. She was 25 years old. Detectives searched the apartment and found a syringe still in her arm. A few days later, the medical examiner confirmed that she had died of a combination of fentanyl, p-fluorofentanyl and heroin. Her death was ruled an overdose. The funeral was to be held the week before Christmas.

* * *

Several days came and went. In that time, I got ready to go back. I’d been living in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom 600-sq. foot flat in West Surrey, the lease for which was set to expire in a couple of months. Unlike most of my old-time friends, I’d actually managed to keep myself employed and housed for a succession of years. I’d compiled a decent wardrobe, accumulated some savings, earned good credit, etc. I hadn’t made friends. That was the one thing that had been harder when I was clean.

I booked a red-eye flight to take me back to the States. I made it to my terminal with a few minutes to spare, boarded with the last group and managed to get an aisle seat.

We were somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic when I came out of the coach lavatory. It was almost midnight. All the overhead lights were off, except for a few passengers still reading books. It was half-dark. We were miles above the ocean. I made my way to my seat and sat down.

There was nothing left to do. I didn’t feel like reading or listening to music or watching a movie or anything. I was tired. And without anyone there to give me a reason to be optimistic, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was losing myself, had maybe already lost it, or maybe never had it. I kept repeating to myself that this wasn’t true. But I felt hopeless. I felt like shit. I understood finally that I wasn’t ready to deal with all this, and as I stared down at the tips of the seaswells miles below the plane, I let out a deep, long breath. Then, I reached up, pressed the heels of both hands over my eyes, drowning everything into an obsidian void, and burst into tears.

My name is Jackson Diianni. I'm a graduate of Ithaca College with a degree in Film and TV. I’ve written fiction for Spinozablue and cultural criticism for publications like Salon, Slant and Bright Lights Film Journal. I’ve interviewed numerous well-known artists, including Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams and I’ve written political essays for publications like Common Dreams.