Meteora by Alex Treuber

By the time we reached Temecula, she was pretty strung out. Her pink toenails looked like little candies against the gray leather dashboard, her knees jackknifed against her chest as she rocked back and forth. I tried to take her hand, tell her it would pass, but she just looked out the window at the passing golden hills. 

We drove under countless green interstate signs, each one a reminder of a life not lived. Whenever she recognized a name, she begged me to pull over. “Please, baby, let’s just find a little motel in Riverside. Just a straightener. They’ll never notice.”

 “It’s not ours to use, baby,” I would say. “We just gotta make it to Seattle.” At rest stops we went to the bathroom together. I held her hair back as she vomited, wiping the sweat from her face, kissing her eyebrows as her breath echoed against the cement walls. 

We bought little bottles of orange juice to dissolve the diskets they’d given her at the clinic in San Diego. She’d sip the concoction and slowly drift off, using one of my hoodies as her blanket and pillow. I angled my visor flap to shade her face from the setting sun, gently stroking her curled leg as we drove north. Occasionally she would stir and, momentarily freed from the grips of withdrawal, ask me how much we had hidden under the floor of the trunk in the spare wheel well. I would remind her, and she’d calculate it again on her phone. “Baby,” she would say, turning over to nuzzle me, her voice raspy with sleep, “did you know we’re millionaires?”

##

I first saw her at a record shop in Sacramento. She was flipping through a box of 80s British New Wave albums, the tips of her fingers walking along the tops of the vinyl jackets. Her hair was bleached blonde back then, cut short into a shoulder-length bob. She wore a black tank top with lace straps that ended six inches above the start of her black jeans, enough to show a toned stomach and lower back. I felt the gravity in the room shift when she glanced up at me, as if all the records in all the boxes suddenly tipped towards her. Later, over black coffee, she told me she didn’t even own a record player. 

We moved in together two months later. She danced four nights a week at The Temple of Apollo. I told her she didn’t have to, that my salary as a mechanic could cover us both, but she insisted. She refused to be dependent on anyone else, she said, never wanted to be tied down to someone or something she couldn’t leave at a moment’s notice. Plus, she told me, she liked the attention, and it kept her in shape. Why would she ever need to leave me at a moment’s notice? I would ask. But she would just give me a smile and kiss my cheek. 

##

I did my best to skirt the big cities as a way to reduce temptation. San Bernardino instead of LA proper; Modesto rather than San Francisco. She had friends in the bigger cities, girls she used to dance with, guys she used to use with. It was easier this way, I told myself, for the both of us. 

At night we pulled into roadside motels, dilapidated two-story inns built in the margins of parking lots. We ordered delivery and smoked cigarettes and drank wine out of plastic cups as we flipped through the channels. Every hour or so I would wet a towel and warm it in the greasy microwave before resting it on her forehead, retucking the blankets under her and trying to warm her body with my own. She didn’t really sleep those nights, instead occupying a liminal space, straddling the border of consciousness as she moaned into the pillows. Around 3 a.m., when the methadone reached its nadir, she would cry out, scream at me, plead with me to open the trunk of the car, remove the false floor, and bring her one of the little brown bricks wrapped in tape. “You have to be strong, baby,” I would whisper in her ear as I held her down. She punched and scratched and thrashed at me, and I took it gladly as a way to share in her pain. 

##

We had been living together for just under a year when Ivan came into the shop. He had a beautiful old silver Mercedes E-Class from the nineties that was having transmission issues. After a day or two I had narrowed the problem down to a set of worn-out transmission components that had caused the gears to slip, gradually degrading the engine. When I told him the price tag he whistled through his teeth and ran a hand over his black goatee. “I’ll need a few days to think it over,” he said. As an alternative, I told him, the shop would buy it off him for $9,000, straight cash.  

He stopped me in the parking lot behind the garage after work the next day. The sun was setting behind some pine trees across the road, the sky a cloudless orange.

“I have decided to sell,” he said, pressing an envelope into my hand. He had dark, deep-set eyes and a strong nose. “On one condition: the car goes to you.”

“Well, that’s very kind,” I said. “But that’s not how it works. The shop buys the car, then sells it to a dealer.” 

He straightened. “Then buy it from the shop directly. There is more than enough money in that envelope. Or, if you prefer, pocket the difference yourself.” 

I opened the envelope and looked at the bills. All hundreds, crisp and neat, too many to count in polite company. 

“What’s the catch?” I asked. 

“It’s a gift,” he said. “Or perhaps a downpayment, for services not yet rendered.”

That night we celebrated by driving the car to a lookout point. The city spread out below us, each light a tiny fire. It was easy work, I told her: a trip every few months up and down the coast. Good money too, almost as much as I was already making at the shop. She could quit dancing, I added, maybe even join me once in a while. We could make a vacation out of it. 

She climbed into the back seat, pulling her yellow sundress up over her head. I followed. The windows steamed up as we made love, cocooning us in our own world. At one point I looked up at her, searching for her lips with my own, but they were just out of reach. 

##

On the road I made it a habit of taking the keys with me when I left her in the car. I trusted her more than anything, I really did, but I didn’t trust the addict inside her. It split me clean in two, looking back at her folded in on herself in the passenger’s seat as I waited at the pump or the cash register. There were times I’d forget to grab half the items on the shopping list, so eager I was to get back to the car, to hold her in my hands again. 

In Yreka we stopped at a gas station to buy cigarettes and orange juice. I left her sleeping in the back seat, a tiny black mass barely visible through the center of the windshield. Crickets chirped in the bushes, and the light outside was a lavender indigo in the fading dusk. Inside they were playing an old Johnny Cash song. Ghost Riders in the Sky. At the register I tossed a few of her favorite candy bars onto the worn counter, hoping it would open up her appetite. Orange juice was just about the only thing she had been able to hold down for a day or two. 

I was almost at the car by the time my eyes adjusted to the dark, and I realized she wasn’t there. I dropped the plastic bag and took off running around the corner of the store, around the back, towards the bushes, circling the store now, throwing open the door, checking the aisles, checking the bathroom, back out the front, down the service road back towards the freeway, screaming her name. I spotted her at the top of an embankment, wearing nothing but my oversized hoodie, her head in the window of a pickup truck pulled over on the southbound side of the freeway. Back the way we came, back towards San Diego. The truck screeched away when it saw me approach. I caught her as she collapsed in the road, carried her over to the stiff grass, wrapped her in my arms. “What were you going to do, baby?” I sobbed into her neck. “What were you going to do?” She didn’t look at me, just cried her silent tears, the headlights of oncoming traffic reflected in her glassy green eyes.

##

We’d both been clean for years when we met. I guess we were both anomalies, those select few who could use occasionally without automatically succumbing to full-scale addiction. She’d started in high school, she told me, smoking it as a way to escape the abuse at home. I too had started in high school, although I didn’t have anywhere near the same excuse. For me, it was just another experience, another high that let me temporarily slough off the mortal shell and commune with the wild shimmering light of oblivion. 

She got clean in her first year of community college, keenly aware of the fork in the road. I cut out all that junk after I lost my first job. The hardest part was the nights, reteaching your body how to move in the world in those delicate hours, but eventually it passed. Together, our sobriety didn’t define us, wasn’t something we bonded over or often spoke about. Instead, we treated it as a coincidental life experience, like we both happened to have backpacked through Europe for a summer, nothing more. 

I never could bear to see her at work in those days, so I would wait outside the club, smoking cigarettes and reading books with the seat reclined until her shift ended. At 3:05 a.m. sharp she would kick open the back door and give me a running hug, wrapping her legs around my back and peppering me with kisses. I lived for those moments, those precious seconds when the night’s perfumes and the aftershaves washed away and all that remained was her and I and the stars. 

Back then I was attuned to her every movement, every beat of her heart, so I noticed as soon as she relapsed. Her shifts started ending increasingly later, her movements languid as she trudged to the car, her eyes closed as soon as she flopped down next to me. I noticed her pinpoint pupils in the bathroom mirror as she brushed her teeth, her shallow breathing as she slept next to me. After a few days I confronted her. She told me some of the girls at the club had started snorting it on slower nights. “It’s the tiniest bit, baby. Just to pass the time once in a while. I go weeks without even thinking about it, really.” 

I pleaded with her to get clean. “We don’t need to live like this anymore,” I said. “Between my job at the shop and the runs for Ivan, we’re making good money now. Enough to buy a home in a few years, start a family or whatever. Why don’t you want to quit the club?”

She lit a cigarette, let the smoke tumble from her mouth. “You know why. I’ve told you before.”

“But you have me now,” I said. “I love you, and I’m not going anywhere. Isn’t that enough? I mean, don’t you love me too?”

She took a long pause at this, considering her cigarette before stubbing it out. Then she walked over to me and sat on my lap.

“Of course I love you,” she said, kissing my forehead. “But I think there are different types of love. And sometimes…” She paused again, searching for her words. “…I wonder if we love each other in different ways, or if our love is made up of different substances.” I felt her lips on my scalp, smelled her own hair against my face. “And I think that’s okay, baby. Don’t you think that’s okay?”

I buried my head in her chest before the tears came. “Yes,” I lied, “as long as I have you.”

##

Her condition improved measurably the day we crossed into Oregon, as if California had been a dark hand around her throat that she had finally shaken free. I lowered her window, and she giggled as her eyelashes fluttered in the wind, filling the car with the fresh scent of pine and cedar and mint. On our right, to the east, the earth rose at a slight angle, slotting neatly into the base of dry yellow hills that formed a wall as far as the eye could see. 

In Medford we stopped at an Applebee’s. We laughed across from one another in the big booth as we spread out like starfish, our weary limbs grateful for the space. I told her she could order whatever she wanted, and she did: mozzarella sticks, a chicken quesadilla, a double bacon cheeseburger, and an Oreo milkshake. I sipped Pepsi and picked at some nachos, trying to keep the smile off my face.

Afterwards, we sat on the hood of the car in the parking lot, sharing a cigarette. Her hands still trembled, but much less so, the color in her face returning to its natural olive hue. I put my arm around her and kissed her temple, grateful when she let her weight fall into me. 

“When do you think we’ll reach Seattle?” she asked.

“It depends,” I said. “We could make a big push for it today, but we’d get in late. Probably too late to make delivery, so we’d have to find some place to crash. Or we could break it up, spend the night somewhere along the way.” I took a long drag of the cigarette, blinking the smoke out of my eye. “What do you want to do?”

She took the cigarette from me, watched the smoke disappear into the sunlight. 

“Let’s find a place for tonight. Somewhere nice, somewhere we can treat ourselves.” She looked up at me, finding my lips with her own. For a moment I thought I saw a tear in the corner of her eye, but then it disappeared. “Let’s take it slow.”

##

It was only a matter of time before her using came between us. On nights she didn’t work I held her closely, searching her eyes to reveal what she felt was missing in her life. I cooked her favorite meals, insisted we watch her favorite shows, dreamt up vacations to Mexico and the Caribbean. She would just give me the same wan smile, the same look of pity that kept me grasping for something to hold onto. 

Eventually she’d told me that I didn’t need to pick her up anymore, that things at the club were changing and she didn’t always know when her shifts would end, so I should just go to sleep, and she would find a ride home from one of the other girls. I raised my million objections, asked my million questions, implored her to get clean and quit the club and allow me to be whoever or whatever she needed, but she was obstinate, a cliff against the waves. 

Within a month she was disappearing for days at a time, returning to the apartment while I was at work, her black hairs in the tub and dirty laundry in the hamper the only evidence left behind. I cleaned the bathroom and folded her clean clothes, leaving her little notes which I found discarded on the coffee table at the end of the day. I passed these months in a state of numb detachment. The shop, the runs for Ivan – everything seemed to melt away. The aperture of my life, already so small, had closed entirely, leaving nothing but a tiny string that brushed my fingers in the dark. 

I had been drinking rail whiskey at a bar on a Friday night when I decided to drive over to the club. I smoked a cigarette in the parking lot to sharpen up and tell the world to stop tipping to the left. The girls inside told me she was with a customer in one of the back rooms. I gave it 25 minutes and one more drink before stomping towards the VIP section. I chose Door Number Two and was right: she sat on a low sofa, naked except for the rubber strap around her arm, a shirtless bald man fumbling with a syringe next to her. A blood red light hung above, drenching us all in a haunted pigment. The man stood to meet me; I punched him in the throat, crumpling him immediately. She didn’t scream, didn’t shout, just looked at me with those wet eyes. I took off my sweatshirt and pulled it over her, carrying her back through the club, ignoring the shouts and screams and people in our way, out to the parking lot, into the car, where she looked at me through lidded eyes and said, “Hey, baby, let’s get out of town.”

##

Seattle was rainy when we arrived. The house was indistinguishable from the ones around it, except for the emerald green shutters. I backed the car into the driveway to obscure the trunk from the street as I lifted up the false floor and carefully placed the bricks of heroin in a black duffle bag I kept under the backseat. The stone walkway to the front door was wet and caulked with moss. A middle-aged woman invited me in, brought me to a backroom, and politely asked me to place the duffle bag on a large industrial scale. Next to us, two men drank tea and watched a soccer game on a large plasma TV. The woman nodded, left the room and returned with a leather grip. “Your four percent fee, rounded up to $41,000,” she said with a smile. She walked me back to the front door and told me to mind the step down. 

The car windows were foggy from the rain, so I didn’t see her slumped over in the passenger’s seat until I was almost at the door. The plastic bag she kept in the center console for when she got sick was heavy with red liquid in her lap. Her head was tilted back, her skin clammy, her jaw slack. She did not respond to my voice or touch as I located her pulse. I tossed the leather grip in the back seat and peeled out of the driveway. 

The emergency room was located on the far side of the hospital, costing us valuable minutes. I threw the car in park as I pulled up to the curb behind an ambulance, the keys dangling in the ignition as I ran around to the passenger’s side. She was limp, too heavy to carry. I sprinted into the ER and yelled at the top of my lungs. “Please, my girlfriend is dying! Someone please help!” The room froze for a moment, patients and staff staring, before a nurse jogged forward. “She’s in the car outside!” I said, pointing towards the curb. A man at the front desk waved me forward. “There’s just some paperwork we’ll need you to fill out while they take care of her,” he said. “Let’s start with the patient’s name.” Behind me, the nurse ran back into the waiting room. 

“Where is the car parked?” the nurse called out to me. 

“The curb, it’s right there! The silver Mercedes!” 

The nurse craned her head towards the curb and furrowed her brow. “Can you show us?” Two doctors in blue scrubs ran past me with a stretcher. The attendant rounded the front desk and jogged towards me with a clipboard. 

I suppose I’d known before I stepped out onto the curb, when the nurse gave me that confused look. Or maybe I’d known the day before, sharing one final cigarette together on the hood of the car in that crisp summer light. Perhaps I’d even known the moment I saw her in the record store, all those years before, known that when I looked out the sliding glass doors of the ER, the car would be gone. 

Beside me, the front desk attendant appeared, clipboard in hand. “The patient’s name, sir?”

I fought the temptation to close my eyes. “Meteora,” I said. 

##

Nowadays, I drive a minivan to and from work, the trunk full of soccer balls and grass stains and discarded juice boxes. My patients ask me questions, and I give them answers best I can. I tell them their addictions are no moral failing on their part, that they are often the symptom of some larger void in their life: purpose, family, hope, love. 

Tell me what you know about love, they sometimes ask with a wry smile. I put my pen and paper down, set my glasses on the table, and rub the bridge of my nose. My life plays out on the backs of my eyelids, and I swallow hard. 

I’ll share two things I’ve learned, I tell them, for what it’s worth. For one, love is something that is freely given, not something to be possessed. Doing so is like trying to grip water in your hand. It operates according to its own properties, and the sooner you make peace with that the better. Two, I tell them, our fates and destinies are written in some grand cosmic tapestry, the designs of which are as mysterious as their substance. No soul ever experiences the full scope of human emotion, but some of us are lucky enough to stumble across pure love in some form or fashion, to experience its terrible strength as it streaks through the sky and across our eyes for however long it is granted to us before it burns out. 

“Like a comet,” some of them say to me. 

I laugh to myself. “Something like that.”

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Alex now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He spends his free time writing, traveling, and fending off surprise attacks from his cat, Napoleon. He is currently querying his first novel, The Avenue, a satirical political thriller.

29 August 2025