Release - A Short Story.

Bees...I see bees.

They're buzzing all around me. I feel them alive in my ears and it sends shivers down my spine. I look to the left and look to the right. My vision is blurry, but I see bottles…lots of bottles, and the silhouette of a man who grabs me by the collar and flings me out into the night sky.

"We don't need junkies like you in here", says the man with a kick to my butt. "And stay away!"

I covered my face with my coat and licked the snow covered ground sucking in the melt water. I tried to stand and orient myself, but I just ended up falling into the bush by the side of the road. I stayed in that bush till the break of dawn. I was hungry, but to be honest I smelt so bad that not even a soup kitchen would let me use their facilities.

With the sun on my back I walked out of that bush and into a hot steamy bath in my apartment. It was a modest apartment by all counts. You enter the apartment - there's a bed staring you in the face. You look to the left and you have the bathroom. Not the ideal place to get your date home. I used to work as an investment banker until the global recession took my job away and left me helpless in its wake. Of course I had my savings, but a lot of good investments I had made, turned out to be bad decisions, as the markets crashed and left me with too many regrets. I took to drinking heavily with what was left in the bank, but that wasn't the last straw. At one of my bar crawls I made a few friends who introduced me to marijuana. I didn't quite know the implications back then about what I would be getting into but as I spent more time with them, I started trying harder drugs, like cocaine, ecstasy and acid. But like all junkies, I craved for more. I hit rock bottom finally when I got addicted to heroin. I remembered that day just like it was yesterday. It was the day my wife left me. She was done with my addictions. She was done living with a loser. We got divorced and another part of my savings went into the proceedings. By the end of that messy battle, I had nothing. Just enough money to get by, but not enough will to work. I was lost in a sea of opiates and chemicals. It numbed me to the extent that I couldn’t feel pain, merely observe it happening to me from a distance. It detached me from me.

I sat lost in my thoughts looking out through the window as a light drizzle brushed against my face. Below a myriad of cars blew their horns in that uncoordinated pattern that inflicts temporary seizures in most stoners.

I was at the same time preparing my next hit. I wasn't sober back then, because a sober me would have realised that a hit now would put me out of remission for a healthy 8 - 10 hours post which I would want a drink as the effect wore out.

It was on one of these heroin fuelled drunken nights that I met God. Only I didn't believe it was him back then of course. It happened at a bar that I have no recollection of, but I remember being the only customer, injecting myself in the corner. Before I could get on with it, to put it delicately, I was tapped in the back by whom I believed to be the owner. I quietly slid the syringe into my right pocket. The owner was a tall heavyset man with a hoarse voice dressed in a faded Metallica t-shirt that looked like it was bought before the Cold War. He sat across from me, while I avoided eye contact. He was smoking a cigarette and blowing heaps of smoke in no particular direction. He looked me up and down and I could feel his eyes reading my body, telling truth from fable.

He said, "I hope I'm not disturbing you", and blew a thick gust of smoke in my direction.

I looked back at him with the angriest face I could muster and asked him if he needed something.

He looked at me and said, "I think you're the one that needs something".

I was impatient that this man got to the point. I asked him who he was.

"God", he said

I had a look of amusement on my face that somewhat made the man opposite me more self-conscious. "Is it", I said, "I didn't know God smoked menthol" with all the degree of sarcasm I could pump into my tone.

"Not only do I smoke menthol. I smoke every cigarette on the planet. I've tried every drug on the planet, I am the air, I am the sea and most importantly I am you", said God completely unaware of my sarcasm.

Oh, so you can be whoever you want to be huh, I said with derision. I guess you could become Arnold Schwarzenegger and Asta La Vista my ass, I said sarcastically. 

And suddenly in front of me was Arnold. Not the puffed up mayor of California Arnold, but the chiselled, Arnold from Terminator and he held a shotgun to my nose"

Asta La Vista....said Arnold

"Woaah there", I shrieked, "There's no need to get violent. Let's discuss things. I believe you", I blurted out as paranoia and fear gripped me.

"Good", said Arnold or wait we were back to nondescript looking gentleman in the bar. "Now tell me. What is the meaning of life?"

I tried to comprehend the full weight of this question, but I had this nagging feeling that I was missing something. My hands instinctively reached out into my trousers and located the syringe. In a flash it was out in my hands and I played with it, feeling its surface on my skin. Rolling it in my palms, my sweaty heroin deprived palms. I was getting angry, but I controlled myself.

"Any Ideas", God was mocking me. Asking me the meaning of life when he knew I had no answer. Heck I supposedly lived every day, minute and moment, without knowing what it all meant. What was I supposed to do? There should be a manual to this, but I was determined not to lose this argument with a fake self-styled God or an insane hallucination, whichever of the two this was.

Life is suffering, I said with a look of amusement.

Good, said God. You're a lot smarter than I thought. So if life is suffering, have you suffered enough?

It was a good question - so many ways to define enough. I was pretty sure I was amongst the population that had suffered enough. I was getting angry with this old fool and his insinuations. My head was a pot of boiling red rage as I thought about my life and what I’d lost.

“Have I suffered enough”, I screamed with agonizing rage.”First of all you give me this face, this ugly disjointed face. When I was growing up I saw my friends getting girlfriends, dating while I was trying to figure out how to get a girl to notice me. The irony of it all was that after I'd achieved a degree of success in my career you give me a girl, a shot at happiness and love. And just as easily as it came, you took everything and more away, I lost my job to the recession, couldn't get a break, my wife left me and I started doing drugs. So why you don’t just let me take a hit”, I screamed at him, through my blood stained teeth and crooked jaw.

I hadn't realised it then, but I had already injected myself somewhere during my heated diatribe. I sat down as the calmness of the drug engulfed me.

God asked me, “Do you have another hit? “

I was a paragon of confusion in that one moment where space and time just stop and you float above your body getting flashes of reality from time to time.

But my reality was God...

And he was saying something...

I pulled myself back and tried to pay attention

Another hit.., said God

I reached into my pockets and found another syringe. I reached out with my right hand, syringe held in my palm and God stretched out his right hand and we held hands. I could feel his sweaty palm grabbing the syringe from my hand.  

To my surprise, there was God, patting his arm in that particular ways junkies do. He was tightening the tourniquet and carefully evaluating which vein to exploit. It was fascinating to watch even though I'd done it like a million times.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      We were smashed. There was no doubting it. Gods’ eyes were bleeding. His mouth had dried up to a pucker, all signs of a good trip as for me, I had no idea how I looked.  I didn't remember the last time I'd looked in the mirror actually.

He looked at me with his sunken eyes and said

“Do you know what comes after suffering?”

“More suffering”, I said

“Well, yes partly but what happens when suffering comes to an end”, asked God.

“I don't know genius, mine hasn't come to an end”, I said

“Release”, said God. “It's what comes after suffering. Freedom - a new life. Isn't that what you want?”, asked God.

“So release me God”, I said with my arms spread open like that mushy scene from Titanic.

God held out his hand and said, “Come with me”.

I took his hand and followed him to a door at the far end of the bar. It was a nondescript door whichever way you looked at it, painted a dull brown and faded at the seams.

He opened it and led me inside to a much larger room. The room in fact, was so large that I couldn't see where it ended. It was like walking into air, but this air was filled with the stench of death. From one end of the room to infinity stretched rows and rows of beds. Each of them was occupied by people at different stages of death. They were all miserable, but the ones who were just about to die, any second, any moment, they looked the most peaceful. The prospect of a new life, release God had said.

"This is what I have to be to change my life", I enquired.

In essence, yes, said God.

“But remember, that you're tired of this life, and I'm giving you an alternative”.

I looked at the sea of sickness and death and was astonished at how much I didn't want to die. I looked back at God, but he was gone.

Where are you God? I said

Where are you?

There was no response, only death claiming one human being after another. There was no room. There was no door.

I was frothing from the mouth, gagging on my own bile. My face was expressionless. I was standing in a room of death and I was slipping. Slowly I lost control and fell towards the ground.  My mouth was a river of blood. My eyes were sinking ships as I looked across at a fading God and he smiled.