Excerpt from "Losing Tracks"

The sky above the Strip was porous and soaked up the glow of the neon. Even at night it seemed grey. Hairn sighed as his eyes adjusted from the darkly lit club, his voice trailing off into a silent exhale. Fingers closed on the yellow derm in his pocket, actions and consequences flicking through his mind. He sat down on a step across from the metal door at the back of the club.

He extracted the derm from his pocket and pushed down on the plastic casing, the short needle on the end piercing a vein on his hand. After a few moments the derm withered and he let it fall to the ground, its steady narcotic drive making a sure path towards his brain.

He sighed again. Recently the trips weren't as exciting as they'd once been. He wasn't sure whether his body had begun developing a resistance or if something had changed in his head.

The metal door swung open and clanged loudly against the smooth duracrete wall, a skinny, trashed-looking girl stumbled out into the alley, limp brown hair pressed to her forehead and face. Hairn thought her arms looked spiderly. She wasn't visibly hunched or holding her elbows up but somehow her arms still looked like spider's legs. He decided it must be the way she was moving them.

Regaining her balance she turned. Hairn assumed by the way her face had twisted into a disgruntled snarl that she was about to abuse whoever had decided she was either too wasted or didn't look on enough to belong. She discovered though, that she had missed her opportunity.

“Assholes! Give me the boot will ya. Izza hole anyway, aint gonna get any more of my good...”

Hairn was being fairly quiet but she paused then and turned from the unsympathetic door. Glaring at him, she muttered something unintelligible and stumbled away, eventually reaching the Strip beyond the end of the alleyway where she was absorbed by the flurried press of pedestrians.

Watching the pulsing flow of bodies consume her, Hairn pondered why some people bothered expending emotional energy on inanimate objects. It was intriguing and confusing to him that these individuals appeared to have a disposition or mental metabolism that made them emotionally volatile while they were using.

Whenever he partook – which was regularly of late – he found he tended to become thoughtful rather than aggressive and reactionary. Even the few times he'd done a jet and the famed warmth had begun to radiate, shift and soak him up he noticed that instead of his mind becoming less active in favour of physical action – as others reported theirs did – it usually did the opposite. He found himself not at all obsessed with the intense desire to socialise. Instead his mind worked overtime calculating all kinds of trivial variables; people, their behaviour, appearance, decisions, images, lights, textures, causes, aesthetics, shapes, whatever took his fancy.

In his discussions with other users he became aware of a tendency many of them had to over-dramatise the effect of narcotics, going so far as to pretend the negative effects weren't a big deal and that the positive stuff was quasi-spiritual. The deceit in this didn't surprise Hairn. He still found himself wondering whether or not there were any others out there who also suffered from over-active, regularly melancholic thought processes while fried.
Realising his reverie had led him to his frequently adopted position of staring vacantly at the ground, Hairn looked up. The dim alley was still deserted save for a couple of impressively-sized cockroaches who were cautiously making their way towards him from the pitted corner of a rusty dumpster. 

He'd heard stories of wasters falling asleep in alleys such as this, their softer appendages falling prey to opportunistic roaches before they were able to either move themselves or some passing stranger took pity on them and kicked them onto a doorstep. The large cockroaches common in the city didn't have an ability to climb vertical surfaces making their foraging chances slimmer than that of their smaller cousins. Their activities branched out beyond scavenging however as their increased size gave them new options when it came to eating pieces of live prey.

One of the advancing cockroaches stopped. It had apparently decided the movement of its intended meal made it no longer viable while the braver of the two continued its measured advance. Sitting as still as he could - which wasn't all that still given the yellow - Hairn waited until the cockroach touched the end of his boot. As the inch-long mandibles started to quiver, the roach's front legs inquisitively reaching out, Hairn flicked his foot, flipping the roach onto its back and in one swift movement crushed its head underneath his heel.

Despite the violence that had been a common part of his life to date, something about the sound of the cockroach's demise made him feel oddly sympathetic and disgusted at the same time. He looked away, frowning as he kicked the carcass back towards the dumpster.
The yellow was starting to permeate his spine now, making its way down to his legs and Hairn wondered if it was going to be a dark, busy mental trip or something mellow. He wasn't pleased to discover that his mind had shifted to his most recent girlfriend.

He liked to make up romantic reasons why Kara had left him. The mental instability – on his part – became too much for her. He was too dark and melancholy and she couldn't hack it and his favourite excuse of all, his life was just too dangerous and even though she'd known that from the beginning, eventually it all just got too real.

To some degree, Hairn suspected, all of these things were true but having always been a dogged analyser of variables – especially ones concerning people – he had found he couldn't quite ignore the host of small differences in her manner.

Her greetings when he opened the trap door to their small apartment, the corners of her mouth hinting at derision. Listening to his stories and analyses of experience – she had stopped tilting her head to the side in quite the same way when he spoke – being interested now a chore. Even the time between facing each other in bed and rolling over had become progressively shorter. Her turning away sometimes accompanied by a quiet, hopeless sigh.

It wasn't just her realisation that he was a coward and not as intelligent as he appeared that led to her ditching him though. Ultimately, he knew she'd left him because he was a loser. Not in an obvious way but after a while a host of small things seemed to compound, the end result in his relationships always the same.

He'd expected that particular realisation to make continued using easier, but life being the forever fucked-up and surprising mess it was, he actually found justifying his habit harder. Soon he'd stopped bothering with any justification at all.

Hairn grunted and pushed himself up with a sigh that tapered off into the cold, wiping his hands on the rear of his worn military fatigues. He looked up. The sky was crawling. The grey looked like static but had a biological quality, a strange method of movement more like seething than random pixels.

Walking quickly towards the end of the alley and out into the street he was soon absorbed by the late-night crowd of Nigh-high. He moved aimlessly. Soaking up the mood of the chemically-charged mass of people, ignoring the deep, messy rhythms emanating from competing clubs on the Strip.

Finding a waist high duracrete wall that once separated a garden from the street – now a thin dirt strip and a blank wall behind it – Hairn squatted on his haunches and picked out random individuals. A green-mohawked teenager, leather-clad but baring tattooed shoulders fingered a monoknife hanging at his side from a cord. A suited East-sider wasted on something – probably shizz given his leering wide eyes – stumbled, regained his footing and stopped to wipe some blood from his bright blue collar. Hairn was always intrigued at the number and diversity of people that frequented the Strip, especially given its reputation for quick-wired violence and drug-phased brutality.

He rubbed his eyes and resisted the urge to scratch his upper arm. It was best not to entertaining phantom itches while on yellows. Guess we're all alike in some way, some loose connection somewhere, a messed up neural pathway increasing the desire, ignoring the consequences.

Try as he might, Hairn had never rationalised or adequately described the addictive combination of depressive, self-destructive behaviour, Nigh-high and narcotics. It wasn't just the Strip, there were places less busy than this that he also found exciting. It wasn't just the drugs either. Hairn had gotten a kick out of being here before he'd started using.

Sometimes he even wished for a tragic event in his recent past so he could have a clear reason for his present fast track to a crash, a romantic slide into oblivion. Nothing that had happened to him over the past while seemed sad enough to really earn sympathy though. He'd long since recognised the tragedy lay somewhere in himself.

The first part of Kara's recent revelation that Hairn was a loser had been when she'd found out his story of being beaten by an alcoholic father was just that, total fiction. He chuckled, despite the wave of self-disgust that always came when he remembered that particular, sad little deceit.
'Well, this is certainly turning out to be a shitty trip.'

Hairn stepped down from the wall. Stretching his legs, he decided to add some alcohol to the yellow and started towards, The Slum Bar, an old haunt from slightly better days.