Chapter 1: SICK: where Jesus first wakes up sick unaware he died and came back to life the previous night...*

finished/unfinished

When Jesus next came to, the world was sick. He could smell it and taste it and feel it; an occupying illness which had hijacked every cell of his body. His trousers were still damp and the damp seemed to have penetrated right through to the marrow of his bones. There was not a joint or muscle in his body which did not ache. He threw himself free of his blankets and shot up sitting, breathing hard, as if he had been drowning in his sleep. Before he knew who or where he was he understood he was junk sick. His awareness of the condition was as astute as if it were a vestigial instinct left over from an evolutionary past. Jesus squinted his eyelids unstuck and looked out at the spiritless world which confronted him. He groaned, a low, profound sound. For a moment he questioned nothing. The dull of the day sat stagnant all around. With a winced look of anguish on his face he stared lamentingly into the deadspace of the room as if haunted by some spectral memory of events that he could not quite bring to mind.

Sat up in bed, Jesus felt out his illness, gauging what level it was at.  From his  burning eyes and running nose and his general discomfort he surmised he must have been about  sixteen hours into withdrawals.  And he was:  Jesus Maria was sixteen hours in.  He tried recalling what had happened the previous night but he could not remember. His last memory of the evening was unloading his fix at the Blackhouse. From that, and how he was feeling now, he gathered that whatever he had shot could not have had much, if any, heroin in it at all. As for leaving the Blackhouse, his journey home, or even the smallest recollection of the world party which had taken place, he had absolutely no memory. He looked over at the window. It looked the dullest of dull days out there, Jesus groaned again, wiped the hot tears out his eyes and slowly rose.

What Jesus did know, what he had not forgotten, was Andy promising to lay him on a free shot for the morning. Jesus went through his trouser pockets searching out a small wrap or ball of dope. When he found nothing, not a coin, not a lighter, no wallet he threw his eyes around the room looking for his jacket and bag. Strange, he could not see either of them. That's when he remarked his left foot. It was swollen quadruple, had a large wound in the forestep and had left dried blood all around his toes. It was bad, but nothing he had not seen  before. Since deciding to  begin mauling himself with syringes three years earlier he had experienced a wide array of swellings and lumps and terrifying effects from missed shots. The foot could wait. It would heal itself. What would not heal itself was heroin sickness and it was progressively getting worse with each minute. The sand clock had been stood on its head and Jesus knew he had but hours to stop himself from slipping into complete and debilitating junk withdrawal.

Jesus was baffled. He had searched high and low for his jacket and bag but could not find them anywhere. And that was not all. Neither could he locate his shoes, nor his phone, nor wallet or small change. Even his tobacco and lighter were missing. After using up the little energy he still had he finally sat down on an unsteady wooden kitchen chair that was in the room and closed his eyes. He tried concentrating away the early pains of withdrawal while thinking of anything he could do and of any memory of what had happened. Then Andy's words came to him again, the promise of laying him on a shot and he was back up, hunting around once more, getting crazy and frustrated each time he dragged himself through the flat and came upon none of his belongings.

There's no fucking way I'd have left without having Andy make good on his word, he thought, no fucking way!

That's when he first really pondered the strangeness of it all, and tried thinking as to what had happened after the shot he had taken.As hard as Jesus tried he just could not recall a single moment post-injection. It was all a blank and in all his years of using he had never blacked out like that before. There had been times when he had nodded out for a good hour, maybe two if he was extremely lucky, but an entire evening? No way. That was not how heroin worked. He remembered how he felt as the shot rushed through his system, first the strange  taste in his sinuses and also wondering as to whether he could feel anything or not. His last recollection was feeling slightly out of sorts and then nothing more thereafter. An idea as absurd as dying and being robbed and dumped in the street only to survive never entered his head. The closest he got to the reality of it all was to conclude that the heroin must have been laced with strong barbiturates or something, maybe some concentrate form of diazepam which had knocked him out cold for hours before. As to what had become of all his belongings was just a mystery, and most mysterious of all, what had happened to his shoes? He just could not figure. To know more Jesus would need to visit the Blackhouse, but the Blackhouse was miles away and he could never make it sick and with no shoes and with his foot damaged as it was. So Jesus sat put on a t-shirt and a shirt and he sat in the chair, alongside the window, looking out in the hope that one of the many local addicts he knew would pass by, maybe even a dealer, someone who he could call down to for help. And so Jesus stared out the windows and morning slowly merged into afternoon and on this slow, freezing day of the new millennium barely a soul passed down the street and Jesus' illness got progressively more malignant and his burning eyes became a torture and the yawning now strained his jawbones and left him sniffling and his stomach muscles felt like they'd been constantly stretched and punched weak  and something in the day made him dry heave and retch and before the afternoon was out Jesus was a rocking, groaning, dribbling wreck and proper junk illness was then upon him. Time was over. Anything desperate that Jesus could have done to prevent this needed to be done before its onset. Now it was too late. So with his eyes half closed over in suffering and self-pity Jesus Maria moved himself away from the window and the sad light of day and dragged himself back to the mattress on the floor and lay down. He pulled the cover around his rattling body and closed his eyes, dreading each passing moment as he knew that as bad as he felt that it was still nothing yet, that come each hour and by each night and through each day all of hell's fire and passion would hit him in waves of reports, that before this was over and he crawled out into the street crying and begging for help he would be physically and mentally tortured, driven to the point of insanity and despair, sweated down to his essential being and left to marinate in the poison of his own body. Jesus shook and groaned and said “Oh God... no. Oh please God, no.”

Note to self:

Consider throwing Jesus directly into complete sickness rather than this half day of mild illness. It would be a much stronger opening of the real novel, a better birth, waking up right in the centre of the nightmare with no time to do much about it. I'm hesitant to do that because it's not how it would usually happen in real life. usually our bodies wake up in minor discomfort (are woken up by that discomfort) and we descend into fully blown withdrawals while awake.