Jim

It's happening again. Why is it happening again? How the fuck can it be happening again, I did everything it asked of me, why would it do this again? It told me to leave Dublin and I left and it told me to get better at the work and I got better and it told me to take on other people's jobs and I do that now and now it's back. Why, in the name of God, is it back? What have I done to deserve it?

I haven't moved in four hours. Everything's stopped. There's no reason to do anything.

It's the boredom again. The boredom is back.

And all you people are out there in the world going about your business, aren't you? You're talking, going to work, dancing, making tea, having it off, bitching about not having it off, wondering what's for tea tonight, mindlessly devouring everything from kebabs to the History Channel, blithely accepting everything, acting the maggot, answering phones, going on holiday, studying, spawning, raising spawn, picking spawn up from football and ballet lessons, letting Jamie Oliver make you feel like a hopeless bastard unworthy of the greasy, flabby skin you currently infest and begging James Martin to take it all back. That's it, tell the Hairy Bikers what the bad chef said about how you feed your kids. They look like they give good hugs.

Aw, Jesus, people, how do you do it?

Where do you get the mindless fecking energy to force yourselves through it all?

I can, honest to God, chart every crack and crater in the wall above the computer monitor. My foot has gone dead. My wrists hurt because, when everything stopped, my hands were on the keyboard, and I think I might be cutting off my circulation a little bit. It's just so hard to care.

My brain, the reliable old bastard that it is, gives the mental equivalent of a shrug and sighs, "Well, let's just fucking kill yourself, then."

This is what happened last time. Had myself a nice little niche carved out, very lovely flat in a decent part of Dublin, all sorted, money rolling in and never having to lift a finger except when I wanted to. Then the boredom. Then the casual invitation to suicide. I countered by trading up to London. It worked, for a while. Rinse and repeat, resulting in the move up to greater and more romantic criminality. Rinse and repeat and I'm taking on clients, sorting them out, operating an empire that danced when I clapped my hands and never saw the strings that held it.

And, for a time, it was good.

It was fucking beautiful.

And now here I am again, 'Just fucking kill yourself then'. I do genuinely believe that my brain thinks it's helping when it says that. Maybe it has some way of knowing that this is never going to stop. That the boredom never really goes away and I just find things that distract me from it for a while. Any new course I can take is just another quick fix, fending off the inevitable.

Non-existence is the only permanent solution to the boredom?

Yeah, maybe, and so bloody tempting. The psychology of it is dubious, but the logic is sound, and it's logic that's gotten me this far. Psychology is a notoriously dodgy science at the best of times. I say that not as a practitioner of that particular game of chance, but as a detached observer. I have visited nine men and women of the field in my life, two of them entirely by my own volition, and found them to be an especially sketchy bunch.

Four agreed that I am a remorseless psychopath in need of immediate institutional help and vast quantities of medication. Four is not a majority out of nine, so I wasn't hospitalized. Unfortunately they wouldn't give me the drugs as a home prescription either, though. Win some, lose some.

Two called security, and I left their offices, one called the police when I wouldn't, one tried to blow me right there on the couch within four minutes of us meeting and one ended up believing I was a figment of his imagination. Might have helped him out a bit with that. Might have been having a bit of fun there. It was his own fault; he said I feared physical contact and I made him believe that was just how he justified the fact that I was composed of nothing but air.

Sorry, how did I get to telling that?

Oh yes; logic. Simple logical steps.

There is nothing left in life.

Existing hurts.

Not existing will not hurt.

It's easy-peasy when you think about it. It's just I've got this horrible fucking genetic imperative which, as I cast about for some instrument with which to perform the act, starts screaming at me to find something to do.

The genes scream, and the logic shrugs and shakes its head, "Nah," and the genes go on screaming.

Somewhere in the middle, the bulk of my brain just stops. Ceases. Silent.

Sherlock

My God, when will it shut up?

There are nineteen windows in the corner building, which has four potential ground level exits and nobody inside. The rust on the padlock on the main warehouse door suggests upwards of three years disuse, a fact which is contradicted by the near-silent swing on the back door which isn't a door at all but a graffiti-rich plywood panel on a couple of B&Q hinges. No, Homebase; brighter quality of brass, higher nickel content. The broken glass in the concurrent alley is not shards but a fine powder suggestive of small vessels walked into the ground. High traffic area. Vials. Conclusion: drug dealers in operation in this area. Conclusion: trusted, respected, great deal of return custom. Conclusion: good place to score.

All that, by the way, in the space of about half a second, the remainder of which second was dedicated to the delicate last traces of lighter gas and hot metal that mean somewhere nearby someone is already cooking up.

Diacetylmorphine, opioid analgesic, sourced originally from the classic opium poppy, a rare, refined form of the early opium that any upper class English gent could munch away at to treat a cold or headache, then cut back down into a rank, brownish business with really terribly little of that same heady release that one associates with the writings of, for instance, Thomas DeQuincy or the mythos of Fu Manchu. Horrible stuff. Does horrific things to the human body, and under normal circumstances a normal person would have to be mad to willingly accept its withering kiss but you see, these are not normal circumstances, I am not a normal person and Christ Jesus it shuts the bloody perpetual bloody noise up…

If you could hear it, you wouldn't blame me. I swear that to you. Ten minutes, just ten minutes, of this incessant bloody noise and you'd be higher than Everest though you came to me the most upstanding, strong-of-mind and brave-of-heart soul that e'er did live.

Physical dependency is a thing you can combat. You can lock yourself away until the worst goes over, or you can have somebody do that for you, you can work it off gradually or do it all at once, but the psychological side, that's more difficult. Hard to give a damn about the damage done to one's bodily form when one is so berated by the voice of one's own mind, which knows everything, which sees everything, which states it all aloud and knows the dealer is suffering at the moment from some encroachment upon his territories and knows the first girl it sees inside has had four hits today in consequence to four unscrupulous men and that the backpack supporting the head of the blond-haired boy with his hood pulled tight is not, in fact, all-his-worldly-possessions, but his schoolbag.

It's like it knows it's about to be gagged; it goes into overdrive. There are fourteen girders in the ceiling, the best exit is the fire exit beyond the broken-windowed office on the right, the window of which was broken no more than four weeks ago by the unworn sharpness of the shards and broken from within by the amount of glass scattered on this side.

The lighter isn't mine, I can't remember where it came from.

A three-side square of raw, torn wood on the floor shows where a stage has been torn out. In its history this building was a theatre. Then it was a munitions factory during the war; again, the markings on the floor give away the benches that were here and the age of the markings gives me the era and it is, then, logically, gunpowder which has stained the floorboards dark in places. Then it was used to store shoes.

But don't ask me how I know that.

At the sight of the cotton wicking up the bubbling brown, the bloody noise packs in those last brave efforts and snivels quietly to itself in the corner, seeming almost to say that it has only ever been trying to help.

Which is true. I genuinely believe that it believes that.

The needle fills with the ability to tell it to go to hell, and passes on its message to the puncture, to be carried by the vein to where it is needed and then-

And then.

And then.

It's so good.

There is no need to say any more than that it is so damned bloody awful gorgeous fucking wonderful good.

There's nothing else to know.