The narrator records a desperate plea for rescue amid a summer of 2017. A sunny East Village penthouse transformed into a dungeon of misery as Rayya, terminally ill, became consumed by paranoia and drug use. The apartment contained thousands of dollars' worth of cocaine and numerous controlled substances; Rayya cooked, injected, freebased, and snorted drugs, laying thick rails on the coffee table amid alcohol and opioid patches. She counted and weighed the cocaine obsessively, stared with unblinking, hostile eyes, and grew aggressive. Hospice expelled her for uncooperative behavior, and the narrator watched someone expected to die refuse to do so.
Sometime in the summer of 2017 I wrote in my journal, Jesus fucking Christ, please save me. I was trapped in hell, and I could see no way out. Our beautiful, sunny, two-bedroom penthouse apartment in the East Village which I had rented for Rayya to make her happy in the last months of her life had become a dungeon of misery, danger, degradation, drugs.
because our apartment now contained thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of cocaine some of which Rayya was cooking down and shooting into whatever veins she could find upon her beaten-down, disease-ridden body, some of which she was freebasing, some of which she was snorting up her now constantly bloodied nose. But most of the coke, as of this moment, she had chopped up and laid out in thick rails on the coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray, a bottle of whiskey, several bottles of morphine and trazodone and Xanax, a stack of fentanyl patches and a cluster of empty beer bottles.
Good question. What was I looking at? I was looking at somebody who was supposed to be dead by now who had been given six months to live over 15 months earlier but who simply refused to die. I was looking at somebody who had recently gotten kicked out of hospice (who gets kicked out of hospice, by the way?) for being aggressive and uncooperative to the kind, generous nurses and support
Collection
[
|
...
]