April 2004

Alex Suha • Fluid Management, or The Drips I Run With

Saturday morning begins at noon. Daylight trickles onto my face and I greet the familiar morning scene in the house: my roommate Sianis still sleeping, the punk rock splashing out of Chris’s bedroom, the gentle shaded dew on the glass door, the blood on the kitchen linoleum …. That’s funny—I don’t remember blood on the linoleum. Why would there be blood on the linoleum? And more blood .…

Domestic bloodstains are a lot like stars. At first, you may not notice them. Then, when you spot one, the rest rush into view. But this sudden sanguine aesthetic of the kitchen is far from stellar. Pools of blood! Smears! Downward drips of the stuff! And in the bathroom—on the doorknob, the sink, the shower stall!

At this point, I’m looking for a victim. Would the cops buy my story? That I was just sleeping? That I didn’t see or even hear the violent … whatever?!?

The answer, I suppose, starts Thursday night. I’m at rehearsal, as I am every night from 7 to 11. The theatre has a dust about its air, and the pace of this show I’m in, The Seven, sucks sweat from my skin and moisture from my throat. The water fountain near the bathrooms has the sweetest water. During our five- or ten-minute breaks, I fill up a bottle and drink. At these times, I don’t care who’s talking to me, or even what we’ve been going over. The water doesn’t just quench my thirst; after all the tromping around that we do onstage, it shovels up the dead skin in my mouth.

“Guaaaahhhh.”

You know that sound, that one gasp right after you drink something that you like, that you need. I’ve just filled up with water when I get the call from Chris, one of my roommates. I pick up.

"What got broke, Chris?”

"Oh, nothing, man. Nothing got broke.”

"Then what’s wrong?” Something is wrong, I think.“Nothing’s wrong, man. But, uh, you should bring people over after rehearsal.”

An unusual statement. Here it comes….

"Why?”

"'Cause, dude, we bought a keg.”

Now, me, I’m not exactly the “keg in the kitchen” type, but that isn’t why my blood is boiling. My blood is boiling because there’s a rule against kegs in the place, a rule that we all agreed to follow. Chris hanging up on me—twice—doesn’t help my mood.

I know it wasn’t Chris’s idea though. It was Jay—I know it was Jay. But what I don’t know is that Jay drank half a bottle of rum and 15 beers over the course of the day before the keg even got there. He’s flooded his motor skills and passed out.

When I shut the front door firmly behind me, they all know that I’m home. After the slam of that dramatic entrance, things become reluctantly quieter. There are at least 25 gallons of beer in the house—16 of them in a giant iron drum grounded in linoleum. I need to forget all the good work I’ve just done in rehearsal so that I can summon the appropriate anger for an effective face. The first guy I see is Chris, flushed.

"Hey, everybody, Suha is home!” he says, is if to hail me the champion of being home. I don’t buy it.

"Hey, do you want a cup, man?”

I refuse and ask for Jay. He’ll have answers. Chris is only the right hand, and Sianis, although he holds the potential for mass destruction, is a mere spectator, powerless to enforce our landlord’s wishes.

So, I climb the stairs to look for the source of the trouble. His door is open, but I only see a scrunched-up blanket and a big stain on his inflatable mattress. I go downstairs, stone-faced.

"Chris, where is he?”

"Upstairs, man.”

I go back up with Chris and Sianis. I think Sianis comes with us ‘cause he wants to see if I would beat this kid up in his weakened state. From under the scrunched-up blanket, two feet slump out. “What’s the stain?” I ask. Sianis says, “Urine.”

Jay hears us and rises. “Suha. You’re here.” His face looks like death—and so does mine. Wobbling upright, he puts his hand on my shoulder.

"Don’t touch me.”

His eyes slowly slide to the sides of his skull, chill out there for a moment, then fall with the rest of his body into the mattress.

Jay is a god among men. (After reading this story, Jay insisted that I add that sentence.)

"He wet himself?”

"Yup!” the other two say, knowing I would ask and knowing they both would get to answer.

I need to wash my face and cool off, so I head for the bathroom. Why is the bathtub filled with clouded water and bottles of floating shampoo?

"Sianis?!?”

Turns out they thought Jay needed a bath, with his clothes on. That explains his wet hair, I guess. But it doesn’t explain the blood on Saturday. Oh, hell, nothing can explain the blood.

Except that Sianis has this dude over on Friday, to finish off the keg. After enough fluid pressure, he hypothesizes that he doesn’t have any feeling in his pinky finger. His experiment? Stab it. He finds the materials he needs in the kitchen, where we keep the big knives.

So, I guess the moral of the story is: keep the keg in the garage.

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