Aria thanked the man, who was standing over her, confused about why she had handed him back the phone so soon, and started running back in the direction she had come. By the time she spotted her friends in the distance, the red and blue flash of ambulance lights illuminated their figures. Aria stopped and watched, not wanting to be caught up. She watched the police officers and paramedics crowd around EJ, long enough to see him take a huge gasp of air and begin to cough uncontrollably in response to the naloxone being squirted up his nose.
Anthony had run away at the first sight of police cars, afraid to be locked up again, and Wolf was standing against a length of chain-link fencing. He was out of breath, but giving information to the same officer they had seen take away the mentally ill man who was throwing rocks at cars the other day. Even at a distance, Aria recognized the way his glasses and his chubby face seemed to strip him of the ruthless authority that other cops had in spades.
Wolf lied to him by saying that he didn’t know EJ, but that he had seen him collapsed on the sidewalk. He gave the officer his address back in Washington and told them he was visiting a relative nearby. The truth was Wolf had been trying to extricate EJ from the crepuscule of his downfall for months now.
To Wolf, EJ was a lost brother that he had taken it upon himself to rescue. He knew that EJ had lost his way. He wasn’t always this way. EJ used to be a catcher on his high school baseball team. He had lived with the nagging pain of his parents’ divorce and the pain of never really feeling understood. It was pain that no one ever saw to begin with. He hid it beneath the bark of his popularity until he had suffered a sprain and labral tear in his shoulder. The doctor prescribed him OxyContin and when he took it, he noticed that it didn’t only take away the pain of his shoulder, it also numbed the emotional pain that he had grown accustomed to living with. For a while, he faked still being in pain and took to doctor-shopping so he could keep being prescribed his medication until he had to find another way to fuel his addiction. He bought painkillers off of other kids at school, and then he fell in with a group of other addicts who knew a dealer who could supposedly get him anything.
Once he had touched the euphoria of fentanyl, there was no going back. EJ had thrown his entire life away for the haze of opioid addiction, using again and again to avoid the agony of withdrawal.
EJ had run away from home years ago and couch-surfed before his first night on the streets. The night he ran away, he took three of his mother’s sleeping pills to try to hold him over long enough get his hands on a fix. Instead of sending him to sleep, they had put him in an altered state of mind. He put a pot of macaroni and cheese on the stove for two hours and nearly burned the house down. His girlfriend, who lived with him in his parents’ house, had woken up to the sound of the smoke alarm. When she confronted him, he found his father’s handgun and because of his inebriation, was lucky enough to shoot a bullet into the wall instead of through her. His father came downstairs before his mother did. He tackled EJ and called the police on his own son. When EJ was released from the police station, forcibly sobered up, he had no memory of the incident. He didn’t trust himself to be around people anymore. So he came back to his parents’ house just long enough to break up with his girlfriend and to collect a few of his things.
The sound of the double doors being closed when the stretcher was loaded inside the ambulance was inaudible from where Aria was standing. The flashing lights, unaccompanied by the wail of the siren, felt eerie. Aria missed the sense of urgency in the sound.
She’d sensed irritation in the paramedics’ body language instead of concern. Not fully understanding the pain that someone has to be in to end up like EJ, they were frustrated at having to put effort into someone who was so determined to destroy himself.
She watched the ambulance pull away from the curb, do a U-turn and drive right past her. She tried to catch a glimpse of EJ through the back window as it drove by. His addiction rode the chassis of the ambulance with him like a phantom. It was a demon he could not exorcise from himself even for the sake of those who loved him. Though it was invisible, she could almost see it lurking there, knowing it would inevitably come to this.
EJ would come back and say he was sorry. He said it every time sobriety found him in between the wave sets of his life. He said he would try, but never hard enough to withstand the crucifixion of the way getting sober felt. His soul cried out every time he’d swallow a pill or jam a needle into another vein, but he ignored it so long he could no longer hear the scream. Watching the ambulance disappear over the horizon, Aria stared down the invisible phantom that both was and wasn’t him, long enough to see that it
