BORRASCA - Bagian 5 - Chapter 8 (English)

The hotel was quiet – no police presence, no note on our door, no blinking light on the phone, nothing to confirm that we had indeed been outed. Kimber tiredly climbed the stairs to the room and laid down on the bed as I loaded everything into the car. I let her lie there while I locked myself in the bathroom to get high. When I came out she seemed to be asleep.

“Kimber, come on, we’ve gotta go.”

Nothing.

“Kimber.” I walked over and shook her.

“No. I’m not going anywhere.” She answered. “You can go. Take me car. Just leave me here.”

I wanted to argue with her but my eyes were already heavy as the H breathed sweet euphoria into my body. I laid down on the other bed and enjoyed the high for a while. If we were going to be killed in our sleep that night, I wanted it to be like this.

I dreamt of nothing but blackness, which is what the dope bought me. But slowly I became awake in the darkness to the sound of piercing metal screams floating down from the mountains. Echoes of a beast already slain, but still haunting me, hunting me. The nightmares were back.

I turned my head toward the window and watched the snowflakes that were falling through the florescent light over our door. No one had come in the night to kill us yet. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the feeling of heaven still coursing through me. It was a feeling I loved, waking up high, enjoying it for a few minutes and trusting that it’ll cradle me back to sleep and make me whole in the night. It was a monster I never wanted to kill. It encompassed me.

The metal whirling started up again. I opened my eyes to the window, as if expecting to see the Shiny Gentleman sitting outside of it, covered in snow. Was it real? It was so hard to tell… I began nodding off again.

And then I heard it a third time. The Shiny Gentleman was quieter than it had been nine years before but it was still there, still alive, floating down through the black mountains to my door. I concentrated. My head tried to wander but I focused on the noise again and again until I was sure. It was real.

When I opened my eyes sunlight was peeking through the curtains. I turned over to look at Kimber’s bed. She had her back to me and was still curled into a ball above the covers. It didn’t look like she had moved since the night before.

“Kimber.” She didn’t respond.

“Kimber!”

“What do you want, Sam?” I heard the quiet reply.

“I heard it last night. The Shiny Gentleman.” I took a deep breath. “Borrasca is still there.”

She was silent a moment and then slowly rolled over to look at me. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“I did. I swear. It’s quieter, like it’s farther away but it was there.”

Kimber sighed and then sat up. She looked at the clock. 7:53am. “I don’t think you heard anything at all.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “I know what I heard, K.”

She shrugged and got out of bed. “I’m sure you believe it.” She said as she shrugged off her parka.

“Kimber.” I said, leaning up on one elbow.

“You saw it yourself, Sam. They’re gone. It’s over. I haven’t heard the- the-…I haven’t heard that sound once in the three days we’ve been here.”

“But I did!”

“I think you probably dreamt it.” She said emotionlessly. “Sam.”

“What?” I snapped my head up.

“You fucking drifted off again. I’m sick of this shit from you. Your fucking addiction has turned you into a different person.” She pointed at my bag and I knew that she knew exactly how often I had been getting high.

“Of course I’m a different person.” I said defensively. “You haven’t seen me in a decade.”

“You know that’s not what I meant, I’m talking about the heroin. You’re killing yourself, Sam, you look like a ghost already.” Kimber threw the parka on a chair and wound a scarf around her neck. She sat cross-legged on the tattered chair in the corner of the room.

“Is this an intervention?” I asked. “Because better friends have tried.” Liar.

“Fuck off, Sam. This isn’t even about the drugs anymore. I can’t rely on you. You make yourself a fucking liability. Nodding off, passing out, not at all in control of yourself, always needing a fucking fix…and you’re mean. Vicious, even. You forget things that happened hours or even minutes before. I needed you here, Sam. And you fucking let me down.”

“I didn’t ask to come on this little mission of yours.” I said hotly. “I told you no back in Chicago.”

“No one put a gun to your head.”

“Well you may as well have. I wasn’t going to let you go alone and get yourself killed.”

“So you come with me and put my life in danger every chance you get?”

“I…”

“Just forget it. This was all for nothing anyway. They know we’re here. They haven’t even attempted to stop us because they know how powerless we are. We can’t do anything because there is nothing left to expose. We got outsmarted.”

“I heard the mill last night. They just moved it is all.”

“You didn’t hear anything. You were unconscious.”

“I know what I fucking heard!”

“You don’t know shit. You’re too high to even realize where we are half the time.”

“That is bullshit.”

“You haven’t been sober in days. Maybe weeks. Maybe even years.”

She was right. I haven’t been sober since prison. And even when I was in I was usually high on something. It had been so long. “What do you want from me, Kimber.”

For most of the conversation Kimber had been staring out the window. But now she turned her head and looked straight into my soul as if this was the question she had been waiting for. “I want you to give me Sam back. My Sam.”

Her words cut deep, so I laughed at them.

“I want to be able to trust what you say and be able to tell you things, too. I know you would never lie to me Sam, but when you’re high I can never tell if what you’re seeing and hearing is real. I’m not even totally sure that it was Meera that you were screaming at yesterday.”

“It was.” Wasn’t it?

            “I wanted to tell you who my contact was in Drisking. I wanted you to talk to him. He wants to talk to you. And there are things I wanted to tell you. Things I may as well tell you now since it’s over anyway.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Killian Clery is dead, Sam.”

“What? When?”

“Eight years ago.”

“How?”

“I- I don’t know.” My heart broke for Kimber. Clery was fucking dead and she had known it. Kimber should have been able to confront her abuser. Cut his dick off, kill him if she felt the need to. And now she would never have that chance. And she’d known it all along.

“Kimber…”

“Just fucking stop, Sam, there’s more. You know Ambercot Fort and the Triple Tree? They’re gone. Someone burned that shit to the fucking ground years ago. There’s unrest in Drisking. We could have used that.”

“Fuck.”

“But that’s not even remotely the worst thing. The worst truth of all is this: I didn’t come out here to expose that fucking baby farm. I should have, but I didn’t. I didn’t even come out here to kill my- my-“ She was tripping over her words as she tried to breath in-between them.    “-the man who hurt me. But I really, really wanted to.  The reason I came out here was to find out the truth about Kyle or die trying. And I couldn’t even do either of those things. I don’t know where Kyle is and I’m still alive to live with that pain. So I knew I could never fight all of this.” I wanted to hug Kimber so badly but I knew she wouldn’t want it.

“But you could have,” Kimber continued. “That’s the worst thing, you could have. I brought you out here to do what I can’t. Expose them. Kill them. Help all those women we left here nine years ago. I’m too weak to do it, too broken. The only person I could have helped was Kyle. I thought you could handle…everything else.” Kimber let out a spiteful laugh. “It sounds fucking stupid now.”

“No, it doesn’t. But you’re stronger than you think, Kimber.” I said.

“So are you.”

I didn’t know if she was right. I had monsters I couldn’t kill and she was stronger than I would ever be. But she was hurting and I inflicting so much of that pain. Kimber had been buried under all of these burdens alone. She was trying to carry all the weight of Borrasca and Kyle by herself and I had just made her burdens heavier. She couldn’t afford my weakness on this campaign but still she bore it. Just like when we were kids, Kimber was the glue that held everything together – she was even holding me together. But the glue was cracking, and Kimber was about to shatter. And I was the one making the final swings of the hammer.

I had to listen to her now. She was telling me that she needed me. She needed me, not who I had become. It had been so long since anyone had needed me for anything. And those women, all those years ago. What was it that I had promised them?

I will come back and help you all, I promise. As soon as I find Kimber.

Well, Kimber was here, and so was I. And so were they. Despite it all, I was sure of what I’d heard. I needed to do better. I needed to be better. For her. And Kyle. And all of those I’d left behind. If Borrasca was still there, it meant that maybe, maybe, Kimber’s source was telling the truth about Kyle. And that meant there was hope. But not if I remained the sickly, unpredictable heroin addict that I had let myself become.

“Kimber. In my bag. The side pocket there, rolled up in a pair of pants. There’s a…there’s tinfoil. Dump everything inside of it in the toilet.” I swallowed. “And, and flush it.”

Kimber’s dark expression lightened a fraction and she stood up uncertainly, then went to my bag and found the heroin where I’d told her it would be. She unwrapped the tinfoil and I watched the sadness cross her face when she saw the size of the brick.

“It takes a lot for me.”

“Are you sure about this?” She asked.

Was I? No. I hated almost everything about the idea and my body was already recoiling at the thought. “Yes.”

Kimber came back from the bathroom and sat down on the edge of her bed. “What- what do I do now?”

“I’ve actually only done this once and only for a few days. The next 72 hours are going to suck for us both. I can go sleep in the car for a few days if- “

“No. No, Sam, I’m going to be here.”

“Okay. Well, here’s what you can expect: I’m going to be a total asshole.”

Kimber rolled her eyes. “Check.”

“I’m going to feel cold all the time.”

She looked over at the thermostat which was currently set at 84. “Check.”

“I’m going to be in pain. A lot of it. And I’m going to sleep like shit.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Check.”

“And…I’m probably going to ask you to find me dope.”

“I…I wouldn’t even know where…”

“And I’ll know that but I’ll ask anyway. This will probably start in a few hours and peak sometime tomorrow but I’m a heavy user so it could be…a few days. How long are we checked into this hotel?”

“It’s open ended.”

“Well…that’s good.”

Kimber crawled over the bed to where I was sitting and for the first time since we were kids she put her arm around me and lay her head on mine. “You’re going to be okay, Sam. You’re stronger than you know.”

I believed her. But the question for me wasn’t whether I could do it – with Kimber by my side I knew I could – the real controversy was who would appear on the other side? I hadn’t been sober since I was a teenager, and I had no idea who I was going to be in three days.

I glanced over at the thermostat and pulled the quilt up higher on my body. I was already feeling a chill.