Tonight is the best night night I've experienced in a very long time (which is an immediate turn off to doctors all across the world, painting me as one of those online ads with the slogans "doctors hate him" printed boldly next to my disheveled picture), the night that I am finally content with the extent at which I am sailing through the misty waters upon the sailboat of sleep, far from the horizon of waking up and facing the harsh reality where my best friend is falling apart right before my eyes, but my eyes are shut right now and hopefully will be shut for a few more hours, fucking both my hatred of people sleeping in so that half of their day is wasted on unconsciousness, and my overprotective concern with my roommate who conceivably is sleeping right next to me, and if not then he's silently screaming about his vivid nightmares and benignly not waking me to talk about them, and while I should be helping him, as that's what I've been so relentlessly doing for the past few days, I have barely allotted myself time to relax in a field in which everyone should be able to relax, like, every fucking night in order to keep them alive, and I shouldn't really bother with Lucien when he would reject my services anyway, so sleep is far more productive than reaching for something ten feet above me when there is no taller person to aid me in my endeavors.
And it's a fucking spectacular feeling to just sink into all the pleasant sensations in life, sleeping for as long as I please when earlier I pleased to stay awake for as long as possible to make sure that my friend wasn't off killing himself, but he should be fine, as he so rigorously assures me every time I even glance at him with no malignant intentions whatsoever, which may be a lie, but I'm not going to push him into a state of increased melancholy, more so than before, when I could be enjoying myself in the only comforting place I've found since the persistent David Kammerer appeared back in Lucien's life and flipped everything upside down with his incessant begging, a pathetic little thing unworthy of my roommate's attention, and I can only pray that with my recovery from sleep deprivation will come Lucien's recovery from his long lost nightmare, but that's just a wish when anything is possible in the productions of sleep, a natural psychedelic for all humans.
It's just so nice to be resting here, head conceivably nestled into the pillow like it's glued onto me with an adhesive like no other, not giving a shit about anything except the visions buzzing inside my brain that are fortunately the opposite of what usually buzzes through my brain, and I could stay here forever if I didn't have a friend to look after.
And that's all going splendidly, and I really wish it would never stop, but it does, and all of the sudden I find myself snapped back into the cruel remains of what could be, the hangover from a night of the heavy drugs called dreaming, but to my surprise the sky is still stained with ash and pollution and the occasional pin of fire, signaling that it remains to be late into the night when I thought it would be late into the morning. I really have been deprived of sleep, and it's gotten to the point where a few hours of rest is what my brain thinks is a full cycle of it.
Unsure of exactly what time it is, the digital clock resting on Lucien's side of the bed blares that it's around one and a quarter in the morning, worthy of the sky's current hue, but that's all of the sudden not my biggest concern. My biggest concern is that the clock is on Lucien's side of the bed, but Lucien isn't on Lucien's side of the bed, where he should be.
Now, he is a man prone to exploring and wandering when he cannot fall back asleep, but with the current state of things his intentions can't help but be deciphered as more sinister than it would seem to the rest of the world, as he could be of doing a who knows what that is destructive enough to fatally wound my best friend, all on purpose and all derived from his full fledged hatred of existing.
He does whatever he chooses, no matter how dangerous it is to his health and to other people's health, both mental and physical, just aiming for something to occupy him, something to divide his mind from the troubles of his personal world. What he's doing is deceptive in order to preserve himself in a lie that seems almost beneficial, like turning all his watches to five o'clock so that it's happy hour for as long as he wants it to be, and he still hasn't figured out that it will never work, that he will forever be on the infinite road of pain unless he receives the help with which I've been supplying him unsuccessfully.
I don't even know if checking on him will be fruitful, because he'd hate my motives if he were ever to find them out, being absolutely appalled that I would think he's contemplating suicide when that's exactly what his attitude suggests, but I must do it, and discreetly so, and with that decision rooted into my head for a love towards my companion, I tumble out of bed with all of my might that would beseech me otherwise, and stalk out of the bedroom on the pursuit for Lucien.
Instead, I find the worst, what was lurking in the back of my mind when I first saw that Lucien was missing from the bed, and that worst is that he really is missing, missing from everywhere in the house. He could be on the fucking streets at one o'clock in the morning, doing something dangerous, no doubt, and I have no idea where he could possibly be, and that fucking terrifies me. It should terrify any friend, but this matter is emphasized by the fact that Lucien, a man of many talents that should not be wasted but are going to be wasted, is definitely out for the release of suicide, and it's no secret that the suicidal hide their desire to die from everyone except themselves, whom they blast with it constantly until it's as important to them as food and water and all things that they won't need when they've finally achieved that desire, and I can't fucking allow this to happen. I can't, not after everything I've done to protect Lucien when I thought it would end in the other way around.
My movements are hectic now, deployed with the mission of locating my best friend that I can already tell isn't here and hasn't been here for a while, but I'm just fucking desperate, and desperation does not cease for rationality, even if it smacks you right in the face, because as much as I would love to reject the notion, Lucien has vanished and isn't coming back at least until morning, if at all, and I will be alone for around seven hours to wonder where the hell he's gone and why the hell he left in the first place, though that reason is quite clear.
I'm trapped within my worrying until a blaring upon the phone line distracts me from it and ushers me over to pick up the call. I almost consider not doing so, but I then realize that it is something that can occupy me from my fretting, and it might be important to where Lucien is, so with trembling extremities I lift the phone from its port and allow the sound waves to travel through me like electricity, regarded as dangerous but also regarded as a necessity.
The caller is unknown, and so is the man on the other end of the line, and all I can pick up is the shaking of that man's breath as he prepares to deliver some news about the tragedy that has either befallen him or my roommate, and though I view myself as a kind person, I'd rather have Lucien safe than someone I don't even know, but I shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly, for it is a disastrous mental ordeal as a consequence of anxiety.
Finally, the man speaks, his voice as wobbly as his breathing, and says, "U-um, are you..." — he fumbles with the name for a moment — "Allen Ginsberg?"
I opt for a few seconds of silence, shifting my grip on the phone and on my feet's placement upon the tile, suspicious now. "Yes, how do you know me?"
He speaks quickly, uneasily. "Um, well, I don't, actually, but you seem to be the emergency contact on this guy's phone, and...and..." The man's throat chips with apprehension and the salty saliva of tears, almost like he is physically unable to string together coherent sentences that deliver what is actually going on.
There's no time to be sensitive when I am uncertain whether or not this news is good or bad, and I can only assume the latter, so I prompt rather harshly, "And what?"
"And that guy was hit by a car...my car, and...there's no way to put this lightly, but he's...he's dead."
This strikes me with a fatal bat to the stomach, like all of my organs are collapsing into a heap of deflated balloons, except for my lungs, who are huffing and puffing and laboring to sustain themselves when reality is poking holes with needles into their fragile membranes, just a bodily system built on futility that is functioning only in the sense that their demise is fully operational and sweeping in as if it were the same car that killed my fucking best friend. Each day I get better at existing, but nothing could have prepared me for this blow to my personal universe, nothing in the entire world and beyond.
There are a lot of goodbyes in this world, but there are none to accommodate my current situation, so I am trapped between helplessness and frustration, because once again I am silenced without even my writing to aid me, and the silence is unbearable. I have nothing to say and probably will have nothing to say for quite a while, but there's still this frantic man waiting anxiously on the other end of the phone who needs a quick answer, a quick answer that I cannot provide him with.
"Sir?" the man asks to make sure I'm still there and haven't passed out in a matter of seconds following the shocking news, which I just might do if I forget about the news for a moment and then bring myself back to it in order to sincerely replicate the astonishment.
"Yes, I'm here."
"I called the police before calling you, and they said will take your friend down to the morgue so that you can see him," the man attempts to console me, and however gruesome it is, I do, in fact, wish to see the floppy vessel that couldn't preserve all of Lucien's brilliance when it decided to malfunction. "I just wanted to say that I'm sorry."
"No, it wasn't your fault," I reassure the man, a back and forth exchange of comforting each other, but I'm still somewhat foggy about all of this, even if it is my duty to speak to the man that is already crumbling. "Please don't stress about it."
And, having had enough of the wreck of the man, I hang up the phone before I become a wreck myself, suspended only in confusion and a doubt that any of this is even real.
~~~~~
A/N: the beginning of this chapter was so funny to write bc allen thought lucien was alive lmao i'm so mean
naturalism: the belief that the supernatural are distinguished from nature
~Dakotank