Living Wasteland

 📅 Late April 2012

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ: ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ, ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴛʀᴀғғɪᴄᴋɪɴɢ, ᴀɴᴅ sᴇx ᴡᴏʀᴋ〛

Anarchy had gotten clean. Gotten clean and grown up somewhat, despite his 18th birthday still being a couple weeks away; he’d gotten clean and grown and earned the opportunity to go out on his own. With that privilege, he’d started hitting the gym on occasion, and then consistently. He'd packed on weight and muscle and by late April the skeletal kid Kato and crew had scraped off the sidewalk in December had started to be replaced by a tall, strong-looking man—even if he was still a little lean. 
And they all trusted him. 

Kato trusted him. He did. Trust was an endeavor and a half for him, and he struggled to get it to stick—sometimes he still didn’t know how long he could actually trust Sethfire to keep putting up with him; taking care of him. But Anarchy was different—and sure, maybe it had something to do with the fact that he “owed” them: That they’d saved his ass and bought him a bass and tossing all that in the trash would require terminal stupidity—but Anarchy also just was as he appeared to be; he said what he thought and he revealed his history to them the way someone would show a doctor a wound and he was willing to let them do with it what they would. And what Kato did was—against all odds—trust Anarchy. 
And yet…Kato had seen the bruise on his jaw two weeks ago; almost invisible beneath his newly grown stubble, but not quite. And another had appeared on his temple, peeking out from his dark hairline that morning before Anarchy woke up and fluffed the longer front of his fauxhawk over it. Anarchy had held himself awkwardly a while back, too; had to skip the gym because his side hurt—he said he pulled a muscle—but now Kato wasn’t sure how true that had been.

Kato played it cool and let the morning be normal; he walked Athena to the metro station for school and chatted like usual. He wanted to confide in her about his suspicions, but he knew she’d tell Seth right away, and what if it was nothing? Or what if it was something, but ‘Key needed it handled…differently? If it were him and his own bullshit getting scrutinized, Kato wouldn't want Anarchy to just tattle on a hunch or something; he’d want to be given the chance to come clean himself, at least. So Kato held his tongue on the topic with Athena.
“Drop out,” he said to her instead, probably for the 6,000th time since he’d quit school and moved in. “C’mon. ‘Key’s here, now, and his bass playing sounds less like he’s throwing the thing down a metal staircase—we’ll be rocking out properly in no time. We need our drummer.”
Athena laughed and gave Kato a playful, corrective shove. “You’re so mean to him. He’s been playing great for months.”
“All the more reason to get you fully in the game so we can crack down on our first album, then! C’mon, no homework, no math, and you can hang with us more.”
Athena kept smiling, but shook her head. “Nah, I wanna graduate.”
Kato frowned. “The fuck, why? You going to college? You better not ditch us.”
“I’m not gonna ditch you!” They slowed their steps as they arrived at the station and Athena gave Kato a feather-light, affectionate shoulder punch. “Even if I do end up going to college I won’t ditch you. But dropping out would mean finally meeting my parents expectations of me, and fuck that.” 
“I guess I can get behind you making them choke on your success, then. Still…wish it was summer already.”
“Aw, you miss me when I’m away?” She held her arms out for their usual departing hug; he rolled his eyes, smiled, and complied.
“You know it.”
“Aww. Just hang out with ‘Key! I bet he wouldn’t mind if you went to the gym with him.”
“Yeah…I bet he wouldn’t.”

Kato did, after getting home, end up pointedly waiting for Anarchy to depart to the gym…but not to tag along. Sethfire left for class not much earlier than Anarchy headed out, and Kato locked the door behind them both; turning and eyeing the empty apartment like a soldier on a scouting mission as soon as he was finally left alone.
Anarchy slept in the living room still, so it wasn’t like it was actually snooping, Kato reasoned with himself: It’s a common area. But fuck—even if it was snooping he’d be justified anyway! It was for Anarchy’s own good, because something had to be up. Kato fumbled around under the sofa bed and through Anarchy’s folded sheets, pretending that his nervousness was entirely about getting “caught” if Seth or ‘Key had forgotten something and walked back in, and not about the fact that he had no plan at all if his suspicions were realized and there was heroin somewhere. What would he do? What could he do? Tell Seth? Confront Anarchy himself? Was that actually the best option?

His train of thought derailed when his fingertips found an aberrant, rigid bump at the back of one of the sofa cushions and his heart seemed to split as it simultaneously sank and leapt to his throat. He turned the cushion over and unzipped the covering. 

It was a black, zippered hard-case pouch, the same size one might have for pencils at school, with a red cross and the word “NALOXONE” emblazoned on it. Kato frowned. An overdose-reversal kit…He unzipped it. Needles, yes, but still sealed in their sterile packaging. Alcohol wipes; a card with an infographic for the recovery position; a little vial of Naloxone. No paraphernalia—not that Kato felt truly comforted by the absence, because its existence was implied by the presence of the Naloxone. 
Kato tried to come up with an innocent explanation—maybe ‘Key’s clinic handed them out or something—but then why was it hidden? Why was it zipped into the back of the sofa cushion like contraband? Kato bit his lip and fretted.

He ended up just sitting on the couch like a statue for the better part of an hour, waiting to hear the lock click upon Anarchy’s return from the gym.
“Sup, K-O? I’m home,” Anarchy greeted, crossing the threshold and turning to shut the door. Kato stayed silent and stared at him from the couch, cross-legged and holding the overdose kit with both hands, waiting.
“What’s up?” Anarchy repeated, finally facing him, the door latched. His eyes found the Naloxone bag and he frowned. “Been digging around, huh?” he asked.
“Why do you have this?” Kato challenged, tapping the kit against his ankles.
Anarchy shrugged and turned to hang up his jacket. “You can get ‘em free at the clinic.”
“That’s not an answer and you know it,” Kato said, scowling and getting to his feet. He felt stung somehow; wounded by the obtuse response. “Why do you have one? Where are all the bruises coming from?”

Anarchy stiffened and he looked rather like a dog caught misbehaving when he turned back around. He crossed his arms but there was something sheepish in his expression that bled through whatever guarded front he was trying to throw up. 
“Can you just take my word that it’s nothing to worry about and drop it?” he asked. 
“Fat fucking chance. You’ve been going back to the squat, haven’t you?”
Anarchy dropped his arms and sighed, then rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, I have. But not in the way you think.” He walked over, past Kato, and flipped another of the couch cushions, from which he retrieved an additional pair of Naloxone kits. “Just come with me. I’ll show you.”

Kato assumed that they’d be taking the bus or something; the idea that ‘the squat’ and the underworld it acted as a gateway to could be walking distance took Kato aback. But Anarchy waved him south across Atlantic, towards Warwick, with “It’s just a couple miles. Less.”
In between the traffic noise, Anarchy briefly explained that he was just trying to help people, and he’d hidden his outings because he thought Sethfire would tell him not to risk it, not because he was secretly up to anything else:
“You’d have noticed if I was shooting up again,” he told Kato, rather dryly. “We’re together all the time back home. You’d have caught on. I’m just…trying to make a difference, I guess.”
He sounded sincere, but he always sounded sincere, and he’d also been hiding his little excursions from everyone and not just Seth, so even though Kato tried to trust him on it, he ended up just staring at him most of the 30-minute trip: Studying a hole in the side of Anarchy’s head, trying to bore his way down to the truth. He still hadn’t explained the bruises, and Kato was getting ready to start putting the screws to him about that when they turned onto New Lots and something about walking through the shadows of the heavily graffitied, paint-peeling auto repair shops seemed to trigger a subtle metamorphosis in Anarchy. The windows of the buildings they passed sprouted thicker bars and greyer shutters. So, it seemed, did he.

It was something that left Kato between awed and unsettled, watching his friend’s demeanor change as they drew closer to the spot that Anarchy called ‘the squat.’ As the physical distance between them and the location shrank, it felt that the emotional distance between the pair of them grew. Anarchy’s posture changed; loosely held and easily casual before, it became a shallow imitation of itself: There was tension in his shoulders despite the way he held them rolled slightly back to mimic relaxation. His back was rigid even though held in a position that suggested unconcern—the curve of his spine could have been an open, laid-back, hands-in-pockets lean. But the tenseness of it leant the pose more to a cobra on the defensive; upright, alert, and not to be fucked with.

Their footsteps slowed, then halted, just past a gated-and-shuttered deli-and-grocery. Where there should have been continuation—neighboring narrow businesses or apartments—the adjoining building rotted instead. Gaping black gaps instead of windows; it looked like a brick snarl missing teeth. What had once been an awning or a balcony had been torn away, exposing uneven cinderblock that had started to fall away and become jagged. And then there was nothing: Caged by a failing, plywood-reinforced chainlink fence, an essential void of space beside the hollow structure, as though the hand of God had reached down and ripped away half a city block, leaving only the rubble of its skeleton behind. 
“This is it,” Anarchy said. His tone was amorphous: Cold, flat, resigned, apprehensive, all of the above and none at all. 

Kato gave him a swift glance and panned his gaze across the lot again. There was a sign for a rubbish removal company hung on the sagging fence. ‘Junk Junkies,’ it read, and gave a phone number. The twofold irony failed to quite be humorous. Instead, it jeered. Kato tore his eyes from it and stared around at the rest of the space. It looked like a warzone, felt like a warzone; it was less than a block away from the rest of New York City—familiar New York City; normal New York City—but it wasn’t part of it; couldn’t be. It looked like a dystopian movie set. The hairs on the back of Kato’s neck stood on end and he looked over his shoulder, across the street. A clean-looking, handsome colonial building stood a stark contrast to the plywood-plated, rusted fence-turned-wall and the blasted out shell of a structure behind it, threatening to topple sideways into the lot and crush the remaining skeleton of scaffolding that’d been abandoned there beside it. The world seemed broken here, a rift cleaved into some alternate-universe hellscape on a random Brooklyn street. Did anyone else even notice? People milled around the bus stop out front of the lot; only a couple of them looked like they were actually waiting for the bus.
“You lived here?” Kato finally asked, somewhat shellshocked, giving Anarchy a troubled glance that perhaps came off too crushed, because Anarchy’s brow tightened as though he’d felt pitied.
“Mostly, yeah. For three years…” Anarchy frowned and looked away, up at the black window-holes; a shadow flickered across his face. “Seemed cooler at the beginning. Before the dope and…everything else. Felt rebellious. Free. Back then.”
Kato looked warily around at the blasted lot and the lurkers around the bus stop; the movement of unclear figures behind the fence and in the hollows of the abandoned building.
“Aren’t you worried someone will recognize you?” he asked, hunching his shoulders inward and scratching his arm. 
Anarchy glared around the place like Kato used to glower at his school. He kicked dirt out of a crack in the concrete. “They won’t be here,” he spat. “The boss would send us to one of his spots to clean up before work and most johns didn’t shoot up, themselves, anyway. They're the only thing I wanna avoid. No one here scares me.” 
As though to make his point, Anarchy squared his shoulders and shoved through the break in the “wall” where the chainlink had been split and rolled back on itself to make something of a gate, and Kato was forced to follow him; into ‘the squat.’ 

Behind the plywood curtain wall, the “construction project” Anarchy had always described during mention of the squat came into clearer view. It’d been abandoned as just wood frame and flakeboard and some tattered Tyvek that still hung off its studs and beams like rags off an ascetic—not enough to blunt the wind or repel the rain. Time had clearly brittled the structure; it sagged steeply on its left-hand side and the smell of wood-rot haunted the air, failing to quite be overpowered even by the stench of trash and urine. The rusted nails and gravel coating the ground underfoot weren’t enough of a deterrent to keep a couple tattered tents from having been set up at the corner of the lot, shielded from street view by the decrepit fence. And still people lived even in the crippled, incomplete building: There was rumpled clothing visible through one of the framed-out windows; another had a makeshift trash-bag curtain. 

Anarchy greeted someone sitting and smoking a cigarette in the insubstantial shade of the unstable-looking ‘doorway’ of the structure and asked how some friend of theirs was feeling, while Kato stood in the background, too on edge to really take in their small talk. Anarchy offered them one of the naloxone kits and was explaining where to get more when the arrival of a new stranger at the squat’s ‘entrance’ interrupted them: The smoker stubbed out their cigarette and brushed Anarchy off to go say hello, with a swift handshake that slid money into the newcomer’s palm and something else into their own before they retreated back into the squat. 
Ah. A dealer. 
“D’you know him?” Kato murmured to Anarchy in an undertone. Anarchy gave a barely perceptible frown.
“Not really. He’s poaching.”

Anarchy gave the guy a streetwise nod of greeting and beckoned him over, while Kato instinctively hung back again, wary, a couple steps behind his friend.
Anarchy, by contrast, appeared—eerily, to Kato—chill. He kept a muted smile on his lips and hooked his thumbs back in his pockets. “Hows your stock, dude, you good?” he asked.
“No real party here my man, sorry if y’all looking for that,” the dealer replied. “Tranks and shit these days. Got china white and xans around if y’all needin’ somethin’ stat. Hit me with a number and I can getchu oxy or k-pins some other day.” The guy slowly leveled eye contact with Anarchy. “...Don’t think you are here for that kinda shit tho, my man. I seen you ‘round lately.”
Anarchy made a noncommittal noise; his expression flickered.
“You gotta stop hangin’ ‘round here like you been,” the dealer said. “You scaring people. Makin’ them feel on the edge, like. They gon think this whole damn spot’s been blowed up.”
“I’m helping people,” Anarchy replied; "I've saved people’s necks. That’s money in your pocket, bro.”
“‘Preciate it.” Snake smile. “You wanna help people, how abouts you volunteer at one of them soup kitchens and don’t be makin’ all my clientele feel watched on?”
Anarchy shrugged, or maybe flexed his shoulders. It was hard to tell. “You got naloxone on you?” he asked.
“Nah. Why?”
“That’s why I’m here. Try me again when you do.”
The dealer’s plastic smile dropped and his expression soured into one of annoyance. “What otherwise, kid?”
“Look, you come here with smack, you come prepared to do damage control—or you let me do it for you.” Anarchy raised his eyebrows and tilted his head. “Or maybe you go find somewhere else to hustle; this ain’t your turf anyway, is it? Sick to death of people dyin’, man.” His tone stayed casual, but Kato still grimaced; there was no mistaking the fact that posturing had begun in earnest and his fingers twitched nervously at his sides.
“Uh-huh,” the dealer responded, unfazed. “You gon’ bounce me or some shit? Listen, again, kid: You wanna be a Good Samaritan, you can go bust yo ass at a hospital or summat. I’m working a job here, though.”
“Heres the thing: I'm busting ass to save your ‘clientele’ from ending up in a hospital, and if it ain't my job, it oughta be yours.”

Rigid spines, narrowed eyes, rolled back shoulders and raised chins filled the air with tension even without any uttered threat: Every moment that passed with no ground given seemed to be comprised of fragility itself. There was no smell of gas but it still felt as if a spark could ignite the atmosphere. Kato gritted his teeth and the nervous dart of his eyes found a familiar shape at the dealer’s waistband, almost-but-not-quite concealed by his loose shirt. Kato gave Anarchy an urgent nudge with his elbow.
“‘Key, he has a piece,” he said in a hushed whisper.
Anarchy didn’t budge: He stood his ground and stayed looking defiant; too tall, too strong now—too intimidating. He’d be a stupid person to get into a fistfight with, Kato realized, his nerves mounting. He tugged Anarchy’s arm and hissed his name again. 
“Anarchy!”
“You oughta listen to your boyfriend,” the dealer sneered.

Anarchy clenched his fists and leaned into a forward step he didn't manage to take, because Kato ducked in front of him and crowded him backwards with a half-shove to his chest.
“Key, he’s packing heat! The fuck are you doing?! You’re lucky you've only gotten bruises so far, holy shit!”

“Ya know, I’ll let you two sort this out,” the dealer said coolly.
“Yeah man, go for it,” Kato said, glancing over his shoulder to see the guy start to walk away. He turned back to Anarchy and gave him a shake with the hands still braced at his chest. “GOD, ‘Key!”

Anarchy scowled and stepped backwards, bristling like the fight hadn’t left him yet. “People have died,” he spat. He pointed towards the street. “Did you notice that fucked up mattress near the front? A fifteen-year-old kid used to sleep on that. Until he didn’t. His name was Sam. A year ago a mother of two OD’ed down the street before she could go back to court to even try and get visitation with her kids. There was this one summer where someone was dying almost every week. We all just came to this unspoken agreement that you gave the heads-up before you made the call so we’d all have time to clear out for the cops to do their business. You ever drag a body 50 feet to a bus stop in the summer heat so that the police won’t go digging too deep through your empty motherfucking lot?”
Kato winced but drew his brow, too. “Listen, I’m fucking hearing you, ‘Key, but doing this bullshit is just gonna add ‘some scrappy asian kid who couldnt leave well enough alone’ to the list of dead people for the next guy to recite! What’s the point in working so hard to get clean and recover just to get fuckin’ shot in the same abandoned lot you’d have died in anyway?!”
“I’m not getting beat by the damn drug dealers, alright?!” Anarchy threw his hands out in frustration. “Today would’ve been a first! It’s just that sometimes people come out swinging from getting revived—what do you want me to do, let the bodies pile up again? Nobody’s trying to save anybody living here, nobody except me! I can reverse overdoses and hand out kits for how long? Why is it up to me? These guys are selling people their deaths, the least they can do is throw in a chance at a lifeline!”
“Your heart’s in the right place,” Kato said, “I know it fuckin’ is, but fronting on a guy with a Glock 17 in his waistband won’t save anyone here, ‘Key, it’ll put you in a body bag!”

Anarchy shook his head and looked away moodily. “I’m not worth the cost of ammo to them, I'm sure—”
“Then you’re wrong,” Kato interrupted; “9mm? It’s fuckin’, like, a buck a bullet, dude. If you’re trying to cost them $50 in bags they don’t sell that day? A round is gonna look like a good fucking fit for you!” Kato glanced over his shoulder again and tugged Anarchy by the arm towards the street, towards home. “You’re a good person so maybe you can’t see it, but you’re the exception here and not the fuckin’ rule! Do you think some other junkies won’t jump your ass for getting in the way of their dope? That someone won’t come back to life and just fuckin’ take yours?”
“I’m trying to help them.”
“Yeah. We had to fuckin’ hold you against your will to get you to agree to help, though, remember? You can hand out as much naloxone as you want, ‘Key, but you’re one fuckin’ person. You can’t sort this out from the top down like you want to. The dealers aren’t even the top.”
Anarchy furrowed his brow and gave Kato a confused, frustrated glare. “Then what is?!”
“The violent and overwhelming indifference of the oligarchy, ‘Key, and it’s gonna take a whole lot more than naloxone to fix that,” Kato said. He bumped his shoulder to Anarchy’s and picked up his pace. “C’mon. We gotta get home.”

Anarchy acquiesced, and the tension and rigidity of his posture gradually abated as they walked back home, putting distance between themselves and the squat. 
“...What do you mean?” he asked; “About what’s at the top?”
Kato sighed. “I mean…Ah fuck, I can’t run a class on it right now; I just mean that if anyone with power gave a shit, like about people—not about, like, the ‘war on drugs,’ but people—then all this wouldn’t be going on. Everyone would have more options and shit. To get out of it, any of it.” Kato rubbed his eyebrows. “I’m just…I'm saying that I like your name, Anarchy.” 
They continued walking home in silence, until Anarchy eventually spoke again. 
“...How do we fix it, then?”
Kato shrugged one shoulder and kicked a piece of trash into the gutter. “I dunno if it’s fixable. But I write music anyway.”

Kato paused out front of their apartment when they arrived back at the complex, then turned on his heel to stand in front of Anarchy and seize his shoulders, suddenly fierce.
“I'll tell you what won’t fix anything for anyone, though: You going back there! At all.”
“I told you, I'm not—”
“Not gonna get shot, not gonna pick fights, not gonna get hurt, whatever, ‘Key! That's shit!” Kato gave him a soft shake. “You can do good there, I know, you can save people and take a fist to the eye socket but no matter how much good you can do, you just being there is playing with fire in a gasoline suit, man! Don’t tell me there’s not some itch in the back of that thick fucking skull of yours when a guy like that says he could get you dope right then and there if you gave the word.”
Anarchy looked away and hunched his shoulders defensively, but made no rebuttal.
“Exactly,” Kato said. “That life wants you back and the shit in your head wants you back in it. The you part of you says you’re only going back there to help, but standing there is always one foot in the grave! You’re just an inch away from it sucking you back in if it's so close. You're holding the casket open, dude. You have to shut it.”
Anarchy frowned; his eyes growing sadder; more troubled. “Giving up won't fix it all, either,” he said.
“No. But it’ll save you, and maybe you can help fix it eventually when it’s doable. But only from here, man. Only alive.”