Awake

Chapter Ten - In The Paradise Business

Waking up was the worst part of Ebb's day. It had been for as long as he remembered. The terrible feeling of unease sweeping over you from your toes to your brain, the coldness of it, the shame and humiliation of discovering yourself lying amongst filthy sheets and knowing, somewhere in your half-restored consciousness, that you are a failure in some indefinable way.

  Going to sleep was the best. The warm pressure in your head, the growing disorientation and then, more often than not, bliss worth more than any money could buy. Ebb had never felt it was too much to pay for, to feel that way, to feel godly.

  Not that he was strapped for cash. It had been years since he had had to worry on that account. Ebb was willing to pay whatever was asked of him but there were others willing to pay whatever he asked. He always had more money in his pockets than he knew what to do with.

  There was only one thing he needed to buy. Forget food, forget property, forget investment. Ebb could buy paradise by the gram.

   If he'd been able to get the good stuff then it could happen all at once. The world just disappeared and with it went everything bad and everything cold and everything wrong. It felt blue, like water, like heaven.

   Less pure, it reached him in waves, lapping over him like the sea on a beach, washing him away. It weighed him down, made him tingle, until at last his eyelids would drag him off to sleep and the mellow sweetness of dreams. They filled him, more vivid than any reality.

   Sometimes when he woke, some of the warmth stayed with him and he opened his eyes to find himself filled with a bubble of brilliant optimism, some of his perfection retained even now, even perhaps hours or perhaps days since he slept.

   Ebb had known nights under that power that he would never forget. He had been filled by such a brilliance, such an sense of achievement and wonder that had come from no external source, that he knew they would remain fixed in his mind as though he really had done something truly remarkable, really had earned that feeling. The pinnacle of his life's experiences had been in this dank room, and others like it.

  Sometimes he was truly unconscious, sometimes only in a pseudo-sleep of waking dreams. It mattered not to him. He was the stuff of miracles when it flowed in his bloodstream, untouched and untouchable. He was the only pure thing in the world.

    It was the strangest thing in the world to taste, yet he loved it. It felt like nothing on his tongue, nothing at all. Yet when he exhaled, the perfume of it filled him up, his mouth and nose, of flowers and sweetness. It was the breath of angels.

   But this morning Ebb awoke and retained nothing of his glamour the night before. He was twisted amongst the soiled sheets, his forehead slick with sweat, his eyes staring unseeingly at the cracked, damp plaster of the wall opposite. Somewhere in the distance, there were sounds. They did not matter.

   The room was tiny but it was his. Ebb owned this place, he was the master. What did it matter if he was rarely seen, flying in unreal skies? He still had the right to respect, to his own room. And this was it, small and filthy and thick with the flowered smell hanging in the air, but quite enough for his purposes.