Arianna

After my apartment was set on fire and I couldn’t pay rent, they kicked me out and I didn’t have the heart to try and get another place. I went to friends houses and slept on their couches, or didn’t sleep at all for days at a time. It didn’t matter much really. One of the first places I went was Arianna’s house. I’m not sure how long I was there; when you are on dope like I was at that time, the nights blend into days and you never know which is which. I do know that while I was there I slept once. If you could call it sleeping.

         I prefer to think of it as a few stark hours of forced oblivion that overtook my worn out brain and body. Your head hits the pillow, and you only plan to close your dried out eyes for a few moments, hoping to quiet your racing brain by thinking of just one thing for a while and then suddenly you’re awake. You don’t remember you slept; in fact, you have to check the clock to see if you slept at all. Sometimes a few minutes have passed, sometimes a few hours, and it doesn’t happen again for three or four days. That’s what it was like when I fell asleep at Arianna’s. I came to, ready to do some more dope and greet the day. Or night, whichever it was. But first, I was hungry.

         I walked into Arianna’s living room and saw her on the couch, surrounded by dope and paraphernalia, with a gun in her lap. Since I was hungry, my brain didn’t register the gun right away. It’s amazing how the needs of the body can overcome the fears of the mind. The sight of the gun should have sent me into immediate shock, for I had been robbed at gunpoint just a few weeks before in my home. They tied me up with a ripped up sheet in my bedroom in a big circle with all the other people who lived with me, and stuck their guns in my face while they tore my apartment apart, looking for drugs. They left and it took us an hour to untie ourselves, another two before we gathered enough courage to leave the apartment and try to call for help.

         But I was hungry that morning, and Arianna’s gun slipped my notice.

         “Got any food?”

         Arianna shrugged nonchalantly. “Maybe…you might be able to find something in the kitchen,” she said in monotone.

         Arianna didn’t care about anything. She never seemed to, at least. Everything she did was detached; she said everything as though she was somewhere else and the words came out only because they were necessary for her to remain human. This always made me a little nervous, and I was never sure if I could trust her, or how I actually felt about her. She was just so cold. I thought it was because she did so much dope. Or maybe because she sold drugs. All drug dealers, especially when they are girls, are tough, cold and distant. I’m not sure if it is a survival trait or a result of being robbed and scammed all the time. I began to get this way after being held up at gunpoint and robbed for the third time, but I was never able to fully adopt these character traits. This was my biggest weakness when I was in the game, and probably why some people never took me seriously.

         I managed to find some stale crackers in the pantry. I sat down to eat them, but Arianna handed me a bowl of dope first. I smoked, and soon my belly felt full of cotton and all thoughts of food floated out of my head as I blew thick, white clouds of chemical smoke from my mouth. My brain was alert and ready to take on any challenge that came my way. I was still hungry, but as long as I was this high, eating would be impossible. I knew it would sit in front of me for hours, and I may take a bite here or there, but ultimately the crackers would never get eaten and I would remain hungry until I sobered up again. If I sobered up again. Suddenly, Arianna put down the bowl, picked up the gun from her lap and pointed it in my face. I sat, staring down the barrel, feeling as if I was stuck in some surreal B-movie. I didn’t understand what was going on, and vaguely wondered if I was going to die. So much for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

         “Do you know Thumper?”

         I had no idea who or what Thumper was, and I was high enough to not really care. My mind flitted to thoughts of Bambi, but didn’t feel like a joke would suit the moment, considering she was pointing a gun at my face. “No, I don’t know Thumper. Should I?”

         “Ryker and Stephen never introduced you to a guy named Thumper?”

         I had read about the how the air smells metallic after a gun has been fired, and I vaguely wondered if the metal I smelled in the air was from the dope, because good dope sometimes smells vaguely metallic too, or if I was hallucinating and Arianna had already shot me. I pictured myself on her living room floor with blood and brains oozing out of my head. I often wondered if I was really dead when I was doing dope; I thought maybe my brain wouldn’t realize I had died and my thoughts would go on living my life, stuck in the hell my life had become forever. “No, I’ve never met Thumper.”

         “And he didn’t send you here?”

         I shook my head, still looking at the gun and not Arianna’s face unsure of how to react, and what she was planning to do. I decided I wasn’t dead yet, that Arianna was still trying to decide what the truth was. But I wasn’t sure what she was planning to do. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to see the look on her face if she decided to shoot me. She stared at me for several minutes in a tense, never-ending silence.

         “Good.” She finally lowered the gun. “If I find out you’re lying, you’re dead.” She put the gun under the couch cushion beside her and we started smoking dope again. As if she had never held a gun to my head and never threatened to kill me, we started chatting like old friends. Arianna started passing the pipe to me again, and eventually she began to tell me the story of Thumper, and why she hated him so much.

         Years before, Arianna had been married. She and her husband loved each other, as all husbands and wives should. But Arianna and her husband were not your average married couple. They chose to live their lives together in the dark underbelly of the drug world, surrounded by paranoid addicts living their lives on the brink of insanity. Arianna’s husband’s name was Loki, and he had been selling drugs since he was in high school. Loki and Arianna were a good team. They sold a lot of drugs together, a lot more than Loki had ever been able to sell himself, and they were good at it. Neither of them had to work; they made enough money to rent a nice apartment with furniture and food off their drug sales, and so they had plenty of time to spend together. She told me it was like a never-ending honeymoon, since they rarely slept and were together all the time. And all that time just resulted in them growing closer to each other. For most normal couples this kind of time together would have resulted in endless fighting and bickering. Since doing dope and not sleeping or eating for weeks at a time tends to make people a little grumpy, this type of relationship was very rare in my world. Arianna said she and Loki rarely fought, and they always got along beautifully.

         One day, Arianna and Loki met Thumper. Thumper came over to Arianna and Loki’s house with some of their friends, and he immediately found his way into their lives. Before long, he came over on a regular basis. They didn’t mind, believing that Thumper was a typical dope fiend. He brought sales to Arianna and Loki all the time through his vast network of friends, and didn’t ask for anything more than the chance to smoke some himself. Every once in a while he would put together a larger deal to score a free stash for himself, but was never interested in anything more. He was safe by drug world standards.

         One day, Loki confided in Arianna that he had a bad feeling about Thumper. Apparently Loki and Thumper had been talking that day, and Loki got the feeling that Thumper was hiding something from them. Arianna told Loki that he was being paranoid, and that maybe he needed to take a break from the dope for a while and get some sleep. Thumper had done nothing to them, and had brought them a lot of good business. Loki agreed, and together they took a break from drugs to catch up on sleep for a few days.

         At the end of their break, Thumper broke into Loki and Arianna’s apartment. He brought a few friends who grabbed Arianna and tied her up to a chair in the living room and gagged her. Loki was sleeping, and didn’t wake up until he was tied up as well. They dragged Loki out into the living room in his boxers and explained the situation. Thumper told Loki and Arianna that he was a hit man for the Mexican Mafia, and they sent him to evaluate what was going on at the house. Loki and Arianna had taken a lot of business away from the Mafia, and they weren’t happy about it at all. But the Mafia was smart, and they didn’t want to lose the potential that Loki and Arianna had together.

Thumper explained that he had seen them in action enough, and had decided that the successes they had could be carried on by Arianna alone. So to make sure that she followed their demands, they were going to kill Loki and make Arianna work for them until they felt they had been reimbursed for their troubles. Then they would either kill Arianna, or if she was lucky, let her continue to work for them after it was all done.

         Arianna sat, gagged and helpless as they explained this to her and Loki. They looked at each other from across the room, unable to say goodbye. She desperately tried to think of what she could do to make things stop, anything at all. But she was frozen with fear as Thumper and his friends hung Loki in her living room. She watched as her husband struggled to breathe, watched the life slowly ebb out of him, because Thumper didn’t even have the decency to hang him properly. After it was over, Thumper told Arianna he was going to live with her until they were sure she wouldn’t rat them out. She was instructed to report her husband’s death as a suicide, and introduce Thumper as a friend who was there to help her sort everything out. Not that it mattered much, because when you live in the world that Arianna and her husband lived in, nobody really asks too many questions when someone dies.

         True to his promise, Thumper lived with Arianna for months. He took the profits from all her sales and handled any bills she had, and then turned the rest over to the Mafia. He slept in her bed, ate her food, and made sure she never went to the cops. Every day her hatred towards him grew, as she was never able to fully mourn her husband. She replayed her discussion with Loki about Thumper again and again, and wished that she had believed him. As time passed, she hardened and grew cold and heartless, turning into the Arianna I knew. She plotted to kill Thumper and then herself, to avenge her husband’s death every day. Before she could make herself do it, Thumper disappeared. She was alone, and nobody had bothered her since, despite the threats to make her continue to pay.

         “Nobody’s seen Thumper for years,” she said finally. “Some say he’s dead, but I think he’s still out there. I don’t trust anyone. If you ever see him, you tell me, so I can kill him.”

         I looked at Arianna in shock. This was real life, she was telling the truth. I couldn’t believe that I was smoking dope with someone who had something like that really happen to her. I thought stuff like that only happened in movies. We sat smoking in silence, forgotten crackers scattered around us, and the shiny tip of a gun peering out from under the couch cushion.

         I wondered what Arianna had been like, what Loki had been like. Were they nice? Were they open, caring and fun like the party kids I usually hung out with? Did Arianna go out places before? I sat on that couch wondering, as I have spent many hours since wondering, imagining. But I would never get an answer.

         A few months later, I had an apartment of my own again, and a few friends brought Thumper over to my house. He wasn’t dead. At this point, I hadn’t seen or heard from Arianna since the time I stayed at her house. I remembered her warnings, but he seemed like such a nice guy that I ignored them. The potency of her story had been blurred by drugs and time, and I wasn’t even sure if she had been telling the truth anyway. I might have told her about him being back, but I didn’t have any way to contact her. So I didn’t worry about it too much.

         When I did see Arianna again, Thumper was at her house. This was a few weeks after I had first met him and he stayed at my house. Arianna and Thumper were getting along like old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years and missed each other. I wondered how that was possible from a woman who had threatened to kill me if she found out that I had anything to do with him several months before. I heard rumors that Thumper had some dirt on Arianna, that he was holding something over her head. I did feel he was controlling her actions somehow when I was around the two of them. Arianna seemed tense and uncommunicative. We had never been close friends, and other than the story of her husband, she had never confided in me. But when Thumper was around she was tense and very short with her words as if she was concentrating on not saying the wrong thing. She told me that she had made the whole story up, and that she had only wanted to find Thumper because he owed her money. Since he had paid her when he reappeared, she was okay with him. The story about her husband had seemed so real, though, and her pain had been so blatant when she shared that small piece of her life with me, that I struggled to believe her now. Something was different about Arianna when Thumper was around, and the mystery of it all intrigued me for weeks. But there they were, acting like buddies in front of my face, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.

         Thumper and I eventually dated for a while, but he was too needy and controlling for me. Imagine, a Mafia hit man being needy and controlling. If he even was a Mafia hit man. He said he was at one point, and he had quite a few unusual connections, but Thumper was a true game master. I could never tell what was real with him, and what was a façade. Game masters have to play constantly, hide behind smoke and mirrors, and never reveal their true selves. I started to get good at that after a while and it was fun. Never tell anyone the whole truth; mix pieces of the truth in with blatant but believable lies. Arianna was a game master too. It was survival instinct born out of severe paranoia combined with genuine fear that comes from living your life doing illegal things all the time. It makes everyone a little crazy. After a time it becomes hard to believe what is truth and what is a lie among your friends and in your own life. Stories created to help collect a debt can gain a life of their own and become your life and your reality. People kill each other in horrible ways over trivial things. And nobody ever knows what the truth really is.

         About two months before I sobered up, Thumper got arrested. He was driving to Lake Elsinore to sell some dope to the people who lived there. Lake Elsinore was a great place to go, because dope was scarce there, and you could sell it at double what anyone where we lived would pay for it. Some of the people I hung out with were good friends with some kids who would arrange the deal every time for some free drugs and a portion of the profits. Thumper decided to get in on the deal and he got some dope fronted to him and headed down with the Elsinore kids. They were pulled over on the way and arrested. The Elsinore kids were immediately bailed out, but Thumper had no money. He called them a few weeks later asking them if they could pick him up from jail. He knew the exact date and time of his release. Since no one ever knows this type of information, it made the Elsinore kids suspicious, and they concluded that Thumper had snitched them out to the cops. So they picked Thumper up and dumped him in the lake. Or at least that’s what I heard.

         I still don’t know what ever happened to Arianna. The last I heard, she was making her own dope. I sometimes drive past her apartment complex and wonder if she is still there. I would never check, since she threatened to kill me the last time I saw her. This was partially because she thought I was snitching to the cops, and partially because I accused her of stealing some dope from me. But I often imagine her sitting there on her couch, with crackers and dope scattered around her and a gun in her lap, missing her husband and wanting to die.