One Last Xanax — Part One

He entered her room. The sadness, the waves of sad spinster-ness washed over him. …And she was only twenty-three! Silken doilies were placed under everything in her room: her vases, her candles, her piles of books, her knickknacks. Who used doilies when they were twenty-three? His girlfriend did. As always, he blamed this on her growing up in Bangladesh, though he had only the faintest conception of what Bangladesh was like, and his imagination and the process of making excuses for Nusrat had turned it into a fairly odd place: a doily-covered land where people hunted tigers and ate a lot of Brussels sprouts.

Bangladesh flooded a lot, this he knew. It was the poorest country on earth, this he knew. He had looked up “Bangladesh” once on Wikipedia: the nation’s principal export was jute. This then involved clicking on the Wikipedia link for “jute.” Jute, it turned out, was wood. It probably wasn’t a good sign financially if your principal export was wood. He made lots of jute-related jokes when Nusrat was around. He felt that it was his job to keep some humor in their relationship. She wasn’t going to be the one to do it, Lord knows. They were roommates who had met on Craigslist and now they were fucking and it was his job to entertain her — or entertain himself — with a constant stream of jute-based jokes. Such was his life.

And yesterday, in the afternoon, he had crept into her room and stolen a bunch of Xanax. He would inevitably be found out for this. He would inevitably pay for this. It was… inevitable.

Nusrat entered the bedroom; she said that dinner would be ready soon. He realized that he had been blankly staring at nothing and tried retroactively to make it seem like he hadn’t been blankly staring at nothing. This involved flipping through a book. Halfway through the book, he realized that he had no idea what he was reading, and he paused and looked at the cover. The Sound and the Fury. Okay then.

“I apologized to a soda machine today,” he said.

“Oh. I do that all the time.”

He had not expected this reaction, and it deflated his story. “You do?”

“Yeah. Doors too. I apologized to a door just last week.”

“Huh,” he said. He felt a surge of affection for her.

“Have you been snooping around my room.”

No. ”No.”

“Looking for the Xanax… maybe?”

No. ”No.”

“Okay then.” Was everyone this gullible in Bangladesh? A gullible land where people hunted tigers and ate Brussels sprouts.

He grabbed her by the waist. “We should move to Bangladesh.” This was a recurrent fantasy of his. Her family still owned a farm there. They could move there and he could write a memoir-y sort of thing about it. About a year living in Bangladesh, the poorest nation on earth. A fish-out-of-water sort of thing.

“I told you about this. The worms would go up your legs instantly.”

“Aaaah!” he said. Now he remembered; she had told him before. Something about all the water being infested with vile parasitic worms. “Aaah!” he said again.

“You always go ‘aaah.’ I’ve explained to you about a million times.”

“I always forget!”

She put her hand out and smoothed his hair. “Well, don’t forget. Remember; worms.”

“Right. It does put a damper on the memoir fantasy.”

Their other roommate, Sheila, banged the front door. Thirty seconds later, she banged the door to her room.

“She always goes straight to her room.”

“She likes it there,” Nusrat explained patiently.

“I never see her. It’s like not having a roommate at all.”

“That’s a good thing, though… isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“You told me that you hate having roommates and you hate all people.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” A pause. “You were never infested by worms though, were you?”

She rolled her eyes. “No.”

“…Do we have time to have sex before dinner?”

“No. Not before dinner. And what if Sheila hears us?”

This was Nusrat’s new thing. Constantly worrying that Sheila would hear them.

“I really don’t think that Sheila would care.”

“She would,” Nusrat said. And she left the room and closed the door.

Now, he he felt zero affection for her. Not due to the lack of sex — he hadn’t really wanted sex, had suggested it specifically because he knew she would say no — but due to Nusrat’s lack of… adventurousness. How could someone from a land with tigers and oxen and (yes) vile parasitic worms — be so unadventurous and scared of everything all the time? He was convinced that if he ever went to Bangladesh, he would die within the first thirteen seconds. But Nusrat had survived. She had thrived. And here she was, afraid that fat, boring Sheila would hear them fucking. It was all very mystifying.

He waited until the cooking noises from the kitchen got louder, and then did a quick search through her room for a second vial of Xanax. He couldn’t steal any more from the original bottle; if took more, the level of pills would dip, and it would be noticeable; highly noticeable. But she must have another vial somewhere.

“How was your day?”

It was later. They were in bed.

“It was okay. There’s a new doughnut place near work.” Her voice was half-asleep, drifting in the darkness.

A long pause. “And…?”

“And I got a bacon-and-maple-frosting-covered bear claw.”

He rubbed his belly; a reflexive sort of thing. “Yum!”

Then, he waited.

“And?” he said. His voice was grouchy, tipsy; he had had a bottle of wine with dinner. But Nusrat seemed never to understand that he needed her stories to be more… story-ish. With a beginning and an ending and everything.

“And I got violently ill from it at work.”

“Huh,” he said. “That story took a… darker turn than I expected it to.” But already she was asleep, snoring suddenly now, and she missed the humor of the statement. Assuming that it had any. He wasn’t sure.

She was asleep. He looked at his girlfriend in the half-light, the were-light. …And now, without meaning to, he thought unkind thoughts about his girlfriend. He couldn’t tell which way his thoughts would go when she was asleep, when she was defenseless: at these times his thoughts were either deeply loving (Oh, her dusky skin is so beautiful) or deeply hurtful.

…Did this make him a bad person, this unkindness? He stared at her and he thought: She’s fat, ten pounds overweight at least. She’s boring. She gets sad too easily. Her nipples, her areolas, were far, far too large, though he couldn’t see them at the moment. Her nipples in fact grossed him out deeply. It was bad, but there it was. When they had sex, he often tried to get her to leave her shirt on. She was boring and her nipples were too big.

Was he a bad guy? That was the burning question. Ben Miller, age twenty-four, with a chip in one of his lower right teeth, with sandy brown hair, freckles on his shoulders, lover of cats and dogs and video games, current part-time wine store employee; all these things were true about him, sure — but was he a bad guy?

No. Well, probably not. He wasn’t a bad guy so much as he was a disappointed guy. For his whole life, Ben had felt disappointed. He had big dreams; they hadn’t happened yet. He wanted to be famous — a famous writer or painter or something. But more than that, he wanted his life to be like a movie.

…But even that didn’t get to the heart of the problem. He didn’t just want his life to be like a movie; he wanted his own personal director and choice over the co-stars and a personal lighting team and a crew of husky union guys to haul away the scenery and add new scenery. To make it rain at the right times. To make it sunny at the right times, and no dilly-dallying between the pouring rain and the sunshine, he wanted them when he wanted them, instantly. To provide a light dusting of snow on Christmas Eve; crispy fall weather and falling leaves on Thanksgiving. …He wanted the boring parts edited out and the dramatic scenes to be heightened and multiplied, and he wanted a twenty-second jump-cut if he had to travel from New York to Los Angeles. He wanted Paris and Rome and Vienna to be all bunched together, on the same set, so that he could just stroll between them when he felt like it. …To get very far with pleasing Ben, you’d need to start massively reordering the planet. He wanted the mountains by the seaside, so that he could swim during the day and ski at night. He wanted funnier friends and a smarter, skinnier, cuter, more sexually voracious girlfriend and he wanted this and he wanted that and, and, and…

And so on.

But these things didn’t happen the way he wanted them to, which was why he was so anxious, which was why he drank and why he took drugs.

Which was why he was deeply, deeply worried about running out of Xanax. Which might happen very soon.