She was shocked when she saw him, and said, "Jonas! What happened to you?"
"I got in a fight at work," he said, "with some fucking Russian. Hollywood's full of commie trash. There ain't no Americans in charge of anything these days."
Megan said. "You're hurt."
She was wearing a baggy T-shirt and cutoffs and her legs looked even knobbier and paler than the last time Jonas paid any attention to them. When he'd met her, she had healthy dark brown hair in a stylish bob that ended a couple of inches below her ears and looked like a dark hoodie. She liked to wear those cute tights from Target then, but now the tights and most of her clothes were gone, and her hair was longer, dull, and frizzy. He figured that pretty soon it would be bleached out and falling to her shoulders with bangs reaching to her eyes like Lady Gaga's. A lot of the girls he knew did that to themselves, trying to look like the singer, but they ended up looking like shot-out skeezers, all sunken-eyed, pruned, and shriveled. There were dark circles under Megan's nervous violet eyes and altogether he thought she looked like shit.
"Just get me a damp washcloth and a towel," he said. "I gotta lay down."
When he was lying on the couch, she returned and started dabbing at his wounds, causing him to yelp when she touched his damaged earlobe.
"Jonas," she said. "You've lost a chunk of meat from your ear! How did that happen?"
"A bite," he said.
"He bit you?" she said, shocked.
"Fucking Russians shoulda been nuked to the Stone Age," he said to the ceiling.
She said, "He hurt you pretty bad."
Then Jonas said, "You shoulda seen the damage I did. It wasn't one-way."
She dabbed at his ear with a soiled dishtowel, saying, "I'm sure you kicked his butt."
"I knocked the shit outta that Russian pus bucket," Jonas said to the wall. "Then I almost get busted by the cops for defending myself. Me, the victimized American."
Megan said, "Just rest now and don't think about it."
"This is why my grandpa killed communists in Vietnam?" Jonas said to the coffee table littered with fan magazines, candy wrappers, and pizza boxes, as well as OC paraphernalia, including a 6 x 10 inch piece of tinfoil creased in half, a cigarette lighter, and a ballpoint pen with the ink tube removed lying beside it.
"Try to calm yourself," Megan said.
"So a commie dirtbag could come to Hollywood and sucker me when I wasn't looking?"
Megan said, "Your nose'll start bleeding again. We've got half an eighty left. Do you want to chase the dragon?"
"A half of one bean?" Jonas said. "But I gave you a Ben Franklin yesterday!"
"It was three days ago, and Wilbur's charging us eighty-five per ox. And we smoked a piece of it when we did those watsons and perks. You're having a brownout. Don't you remember any of it?"
He vaguely recalled the Vicodins and Perocets, but he couldn't recall smoking half of an 80 mg OxyContin tablet. "It's that goddamn screw-top wine," he said. "It fucks up my memory. Can't you go boost a better bottle somewhere? I'd even settle for a couple forties of OE."
"I'm not a thief," Megan said.
Jonas was getting heart palpitations and was sweating cold. His knee joints and right shoulder were aching, which he blamed on the fight. But when he looked more closely at Megan he saw that she had broken into a sweat as well, and she couldn't stop yawning and scratching herself. That is, when she wasn't coughing.
"Goddamnit, Megan, look at us," he said. "We're jonesing. I gotta chase the dragon and I mean right now!"
She jumped up, ran to the bedroom, and got the last piece of the OC tablet, bringing it to the coffee table and placing it in the crease of the foil.
"This ain't a complete half," Jonas accused. "You smoked a bite off it, didn't you?"
Megan didn't reply and he was too desperate to press her.
"Just hurry up," he said.
Megan placed the flame of the lighter underneath the foil and heated the OxyContin tablet. Jonas picked up the empty ink tube, which, unlike a drinking straw, would not burn easily, and put it in his mouth. Megan tilted the foil, and as the heated fragment slid down the crease propelled by gravity and heated from beneath the foil, Jonas hungrily inhaled, and even swallowed as much rising smoke as he could, chasing that smoking ox down the crease before it burned up completely.
"You're not worried about me, are you, Jonas ?" Megan said. "Don't you think I need a taste, too?"
Jonas said to her, "You call this chasing the dragon? All you left me was a crumb. There ain't enough ox here to chase a fucking lizard."
He waited for the rush, but all he got was an anemic feeling of lethargy. They were developing such a tolerance that for weeks neither of them had felt the warm flush of the skin or the wonderful drowsy euphoria that they used to get when there was enough for them both. When they weren't so addicted.