ECHOES OF MIKE (rough-help!)

“Toph,” Mike had said to me in that coarse, angry voice, “I'm just tired.”
I'd been waiting for those words. My advice had fallen through the cracks of his mind, and that simple, short, “I'm just tired,” seemed to be the culmination of his years of desperation and yearning. This last statement had caused some sort of unnatural nausea to set in. I contained my panic with rational thoughts. Choking a little bit, inexplicably, suddenly, I rested my hand on my knee for balance. Voices in my mind chanted, he's said that before, he's said it before. But still the unique ring of those words was haunting me- the drug-fevered, lonely pleas seemed to reach me through the phone. I moved the conversation forward apprehensively, suggesting he clean up and take it easy for a while.
Mike cleared his throat loudly and cushioned this abrasive noise with a few involuntary sobs that I knew embarrassed him. I was the only person who heard when Mike Thompson cried.
“Look, fuck cleaning up, we both fucking know....” and his routine rant against sobriety began, seeming to last a while. I twitched a bit, tapped my foot, uncomfortable in anticipation of a new, more disturbing twist on his monologue.
He was a scary guy, Mike Thompson. He had latent anger, which he expiated with unendurable sarcasm and a cruel sneer that he reserved for most people, but not for me. He had no impulse control. He had every drug habit imaginable, the worst drug habits imaginable. He had a rich past, an intelligent past, a past full of love that he chose to forget. His prospects for happiness seemed to stop abruptly at thirteen, when his father abandoned him to choke on his own vomit. He had talent and hope for things he'd forgotten about. He used to love to write, to read, to laugh, to sing. But now the music of his life had ceased, and his ugly sneer only served to shroud the emptiness within.
When he would disappear, he would disappear for days. Usually at weird hours he'd call me, slurring his words and incoherent, across the country, insisting that I help him pay for whatever sordid affair he couldn't make right by his own means. I knew he felt abandoned every time I'd say no- and at night I convinced myself that it wasn't resentment I felt when he called me at parties, begging me for help.
I remember how he concluded our last conversation with an astounding clarity. He was living with his drug dealer, strung out on heroin. He'd been gone from his home two days. “Well,” he said, pausing briefly- a pause that communicated an unparalleled melancholy- “I know you care, but sometimes, that's not enough.” And it took me a minute to realize he'd hung up. Wait it out, I told myself. He'll come around.
For one week I tried to forget about Mike Thompson. This meant forgetting the warmth of being called “Toph”- forever condemning myself to those superficial slaps on the back, to cold, unappealing renditions of the name “Chris” or “Cameronne.” It meant temporarily abandoning all recollections I had of our time together as children- in which we stood together above dead birds, poking them with sticks, in which we laughed and jumped from cliffs into the ocean, in which we grew old and took our separate paths without dissipating that fraternal love, in which our memories mixed together, in which we swore we'd never abandon each other.
And it meant, when his mother's number appeared on the screen of my cell phone, realizing all of my mistakes. His mother, plagued with those maternal anxieties, asked me if I'd spoken to Mike, if he'd called me, if I knew anything at all. I didn't, and acknowledging that condemned me- I swear I felt my organs collapse in mock imitation of death. My prospects for redemption falling from my grip, I searched for my phone and I called him-no reply. His mother's reverberating concern in my head, I pictured many morbid scars, needles, dirt, blood, a lifeless grin on his face. I secretly prepared myself, so it wouldn't hurt as much when she called me. And she did. I remember those soft, motherly, nurturing words, words of encapsulated loss that only a mother can say-“He's dead.”
He's Dead. Those words in sonic echoes, and then guilt-a critique of my actions. Finally, a collage of words surrounding my only image of him- ten year old Mike, blonde curtains of hair around his innocent blue eyes. Suicide, loss, pain, friend.

7.17.06