Anarchism and Absolution

 📅  May[ish] 2016

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴅɪsᴄᴜssɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ + ᴏᴠᴇʀᴅᴏsᴇ ᴀs ᴡᴇʟʟ ᴀs ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ sᴇx ᴛʀᴀғғɪᴄᴋɪɴɢ】

“Hey. ‘Las,” Kaspar said from the couch, and Alaska’s heart broke at the same time his voice did; “Do you think it’s possible to know someone for, cosmically speaking, almost no time at all—like, for way too short a fucking time—and end up stupidly in fuckin’ love with them?”
Alaska walked over and sat down on the cushion beside Kaspar’s head. He'd draped himself with his knees over one arm of the sofa, but lankily took up two thirds of it anyway. She ran her fingers through his hair.
“Tell me about her,” she said. “Or—?”
“Yeah, no. Him.”
“Tell me about him.”
Kaspar looked like he might cry, and raised his hands to loosely gesture, as though painting a canvas floating overhead.
“I spent two years with him. Just two years, I know, but God...Those two years. His name was Anarchy. Or—well, technically it was Anthony. It wasn’t, though, not really, I could tell right away and we fixed it—but yeah…his birth name was Anthony...” Kaspar trailed off and just stared at his left hand, his eyes fixed on a pair of star signs tattooed on his wrist, just next to the bony hollow at the base of his thumb.

“Are those your signs?” Alaska asked softly, “Yours and...?” She trailed off too; sometimes it felt like a struggle to keep up with—or make sense of—Kaspar’s words, and this afternoon was no exception when it came to Anthony’s name-or-not-name.
“Yeah. Mine and Anarchy’s. That’s what we settled on: Anarchy. ‘Key for short. He was a Taurus,” Kaspar said, tracing his right pinkie along the ‘bull horns’ of the Taurus symbol. “He did these. He did a lot of my tattoos—God, he could draw. Stenciled his own for me to fumble through poking. The rose here was one he started. Did the lines. He was amazing, ‘Las. He was amazing...” Kaspar’s voice pitched with grief again and his hands dropped back to his chest, suddenly limp, like a marionette whose strings had been severed.

Alaska could feel the weight in the word “was,” how heavily it stayed in the air, how it drained the color from her brother’s eyes. She wanted to ask what happened. She knew that curiosity wasn’t at all what Kaspar needed.
“‘Anarchy,’ hm? Tell me about that name.” 
A spark flickered behind Kaspar’s eyes. They didn’t quite light up, no—but life re-found them and he lifted his hands again. This time, apparently to self-soothe more than show, he tapped a tiny ‘A’ tattooed on his neck. He had no way of seeing it; he must have memorized its placement.
“An-ar-key. It was the first syllables of his full name… ‘Anthony Arland Keystone.’ We spent a few days on it though; I went through other nicknames. Ari, Key, Kiki. He hated Kiki. But he smiled at it too, and I always saw—even though he tried to frown he’d still be smiling…” A shallow smile flickered across Kaspar’s own face. “We carved it into a boxcar in Wyoming. Not Kiki—Anarchy. His real name. We were switching trains in Cheyenne, right, and that’s me, and so we carved our names into the paint. Anarchy & Cheyenne. Like couples do on tree trunks...I didn’t know it because I was a kid but I was already in love with him by then I think. Or right on the edge and I just tipped over from there. I’d known him for, like, a week.”

Alaska raised her eyebrows but smiled gently, and tried to follow the thread back to its start.
“So you met him while you were train-hopping?” she prompted, and Kaspar barked out a laugh.
“Fuck, I jumped straight in without even telling you how we met, didn’t I? It was in California. Fresno. August; it was so hot. I’d made this delivery, right, two kilograms of cocaine. I felt totally indestructible with the amount of cash I had on me because I was thirteen and an idiot. And I caught sight of him sitting alone outside the freight yard and yelled ‘Hey!’ and when he turned to look at me he had blood all down his face...Turned out his dad had slashed him with a broken bottle and he ran for it.”
Alaska breathed in with understanding.
“So you two instantly had a connection.”
“So we instantly had a connection.”
Kaspar sat up and looped his arms across his knees, effectively folding himself in half. It didn’t look at all comfortable. 
“I was so quick to tell him, ya know? He said what happened with his dad and I just instantly spilled about Nana. Not everything, like, I still get kinda fucked up thinking too hard about it—but I instantly felt like I could tell him that I’d been hurt and I’d run, too. I wouldn’t have been so quick on it even then, but there was something about him. God, ‘Las, if you could have seen the way the sun hit him…It was like he was the most real person I’d ever seen in my life.” Kaspar flopped back to the couch cushions, his head almost in Alaska’s lap. He glanced at her, then past her face, toward the ceiling. “Do you believe in God?” he asked.

Alaska frowned, caught off guard by the non-sequitur and feeling ill at ease with the topic of religion. Even if Kaspar was one of the few people who might understand that discomfort, Alaska felt distinctly apprehensive.
“...No,” she eventually said. Kaspar just blinked and nodded slowly, not looking at all put off. “...Why do you ask?”
Kaspar blinked again, and looked strangely confused, himself.
“...I don’t know, exactly. It just feels like...Fate, or something, with him, and God would explain it. But maybe it’s a different god. I don’t know what I believe. It just feels like there’s more...More than there is. The sunlight on him, and everything, and me being there, right? Fate. And then with Nana and his dad, and our names, too: Like, he wasn’t Anthony and I’m not Kaspar—I mean, you can call me ‘Kaspar’ because you’re my sister and I figure it would’ve been the same with him and ‘Anthony’ and his brother—but he was the first one I went by ‘Chey’ with, and it all felt so...planned. Like soulmates, right, like we were meant to be...I was thinking maybe I should pray more.” Kaspar let out a frail laugh at the end of his sentence—but it rang hollow, and Alaska worried about the distance creeping back into his eyes. She ran her fingers through his hair again as she tried to fit together everything he’d said.
“...What would you pray for?” was the question she eventually settled on asking.
“Forgiveness.” There was an audible ache in the response; Kaspar’s voice had gone suddenly raw. “Forgiveness or death. God can tell him I’m sorry, or I can.”

Alaska flinched internally; her heart dropped in her chest and her eyes flicked to the scar stretching across her brother’s throat. Carefully, she took his head in her hands and scooted over so his head was in her lap; from there she brushed the hair from his face and studied the XO tattooed beside his left eye; how it contrasted with the switchblade inked into his inner forearm. Hugs-and-kisses, a knife, a syringe. Track-marks and roses. Forgiveness or death.
“What happened to him?” she asked gently. 
“I happened to him.” Kaspar rolled onto his side and tucked his knees up, curling fetally towards her. “I was just running drugs when I met him. Just running. We hopped back to NYC together from Fresno. He had nothing for him here, right, and I fell the fuck in love with him. I got him a job muling with me. I told you before, how they did it, like, how it worked for them to get me to start...you know. Selling myself. They started paying me in oxy. Well, it wasn’t me: Us. They eventually started paying us in oxy. We were fifteen.” Kaspar stared, dead-eyed, at a Ⓐ tattoo on his right wrist. “We were kids. And then we were kids hooked on percocet. And then we were kids turning tricks so we could shoot heroin in an abandoned building together. I got him that job.”

Alaska traced her gaze up Kaspar’s arm from that Ⓐ to the syringe at his inner elbow. Her heart ached for him.
“Did he overdose?” she asked softly. Kaspar looked like he might have winced if he had the strength to. Instead he crumpled.
“Must have. I don’t know for certain, but there’s no other real possibilities, ya know? I told you cops found me, right? And put me back in foster care, and that’s how I found out something happened to Nana. That’s when I got separated from him...D’you read the paper?” he asked suddenly.
“...Yes?” Alaska couldn’t conceal her puzzlement, but if it registered to Kaspar at all, he didn’t show it. He just looked exhausted.
“Yeah...So then you know how they’ll have those little...like, two-sentence-long micro-articles? Just because there’s too much fucking crime in this city, so it’ll be like, ‘East Flatbush: 2 men shot outside K-S Discount Mart on Avenue D. Police are investigating,’ or whatever? When I was being kicked around from home to home...I saw, like, three of those about the squat. Bodies being removed from it. One of ‘em actually said ‘body of an adolescent male.’ Like, I don’t know, right? But I do know. He was injecting into his neck the December I got picked up. That kills you, ‘Las. That kills you…” Kaspar’s voice cracked again and the corners of his mouth twitched down into the jittery, fragile frown of someone trying desperately not to cry. He rolled over onto his back again, perhaps hoping that gravity would keep the tears in his eyes. It didn’t, and he wordlessly hugged his arms to himself as he cried, staring up at the ceiling as though refusing to acknowledge the tears would force them into nonexistence. 

Kaspar’s crossed arms hid the Ⓐ and syringe tattoos, but drew Alaska’s attention to a different stick-n-poke; a claw-foot bathtub with a hovering cross, inked into his right upper arm. He’d showed it to her before but she hadn’t wanted to linger on it then. Now, she slowly traced her fingers over the ink-stain memorial to their painful shared childhood.
“For a long time, all I had to go on in regards to your fate was this, Kaspar Cheyenne. You could well have been dead. But here you are,” she said softly. “...Did Anarchy do this tattoo as well?”
“Yeah.”
Alaska’s fingertips lingered on the cross hovering over the bathtub; crookedly hand-done dotted lines indicating a holy glow.
“...Which would he want you to pray for?” she asked, “Forgiveness or death?”
Kaspar’s eyes went a little wider; his brow furrowed. He seemed caught entirely off guard by the question and pressed his tongue to his cheek as he considered. Eventually he swallowed hard, the bob of his Adam’s apple warping the scar across his throat. His voice wavered uncertainly, but the answer itself felt indisputable.
“...Forgiveness.”