(How far can you carry this?)

All the way to Carnegie Hall, or the fucking nuthouse. He doesn't know where they put crazy people any more. He's losing his fucking mind.

He's hurt, and they give him stitches. He plays, and the stitches all snap. He gets some other meaty drummer showing up at his apartment (very concerned) and his bandmates all kicking in on a card full of $20s (unnecessary) because he's been such a fucking trooper -- because he couldn't stop before the clock ran out on him, because he started this song and he wanted to finish it, because the line running through his life hammers away with punishing steadiness and he might as well keep on the beat.

Like undertow, it will tug him back to the practice rooms at Shaffer, like a wrecking-ball hook on a chain it will drag him home again at the end of the night to dream in music, to eat and breathe music until the hooks dig into him again and pull him out into the streets or out to a shitty nightclub that's losing its liquor license on Monday, where he can't see for shit through the dark, just to listen. To the last CD store, then home again, to another shitty bar then home again, to practice, home, to the pharmacist's and then to practice, to practice and to home, to practice, and all the while in his head he's playing, he's hammering with a scraped knuckle on the bruised bone of his cheek trying to keep tempo.

Nobody will have him in their fucking band any more after all that, no matter whose second coming he is. He figures he'll write it down and get it out, maybe he'll publish some original compositions and make the transition from performing monkey to financially insolvent douchebag, but when he tries to scratch it down on paper his right hand can't hold the pen. The callus there that took so long to form has fucking split again.

(How far will it carry you?)

He wakes up at night (that night) and it's Sean Casey there leaning on his chest with both knees, somebody else's virtuosic fingers covering his nose and mouth and pressing. The knot's still tight around his neck, the cord still dangles. It's an orange extension cord, and Andrew can see it in the dark. They never mentioned in court how he really did do it, but it's as good a method as any. Improvisational.

He hurts his arm, again, not badly. He takes pills, tries to figure out some kind of one-armed bandit routine that won't kill him or end his career but will let him eke it out until muscles and tendons maybe heal. He nurses his stitches, alone, and stops going to shitty bars, stops going to practice. The recovery time is fucking unbearable, knocks him on his ass even as he can't justify taking care of himself, can't justify the alternative when it will keep him from pursuing anything meaningful for the rest of his life. He takes even more pills just to keep immobile, in case some other deranged part of him decides to get up in the night and drag out the broken kit from the utility closet and play. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Douchebag. Other people don’t do this. Other entirely capable players don’t do this, and people want to hear them play. Other people do not do this. He’s become a prisoner in two overpriced rooms and a bathroom.

He wakes up in the night feeling like someone is kneeling on his chest. He hears someone in his apartment complex call him a faggot, sneer the word out like a stain on cloth, but when he turns around no one is there.

He sleeps all day. He knots the cord of his headphones around the first two fingers on his right hand and he listens, follows, keeps up.

He's become his own Fletcher. It's like he fucking ate Fletcher and that voice that's been hollering in his ear for two years is six feet under and still inside him, like Fletcher crinkled down into black ash and he drank him. Maybe Fletcher is dead and maybe Fletcher is alive.

He sleeps and takes pills until there are no more pills and his prescription runs out and he can't figure out how to order by mail. The motor in his CD player burns out, the disk drive in his laptop goes unresponsive. He ties the cord of his headphones into a slipknot and loops it around one finger, then pulls it tight.

Maybe Fletcher is dead and maybe Fletcher is alive. Some fragment of Fletcher waits for a quiet moment to be heard and then it'll rip into Andrew like a popped stitch. If he plays loud and long enough maybe he can drown it out.

And Andrew is on the phone in his filthy hollow kitchenette, pressing the broken screen to his broken cheek trying to order a refill, when his eye catches the orange plastic snake of an extension cord running under the utility closet door. If he opens those doors he'll find empty hangers and a broken, stinking drum kit and a dirty suit jacket hanging off a bolted metal bar. No corpses, no ghosts, no strangers, no ashes. Broken things he can't use, and a scuffed coil of plastic that's subbing in for something else, a pre-made knot at the end of a rope. Like the lowest point in his shower where all the water runs to -- everything else in his hollow apartment has led him here to this worn-down rut in his minuscule kitchen where his landlord has placed an extension cord and a bolted-down metal bar.

He'll think about it, stiff-armed and stiff-fingered with the electronic pharmacy menu reading off into his ear demanding he repeat himself and the voice in his throat a barely-human rattle. He'll think about it. What would Fletcher do? Do it, or don't. Show up, or don't. What would he care? What does Andrew care? But like undertow he'll keep going whether he's dead or alive, slide on frictionlessly into a deeper darker place somehow deeper and darker than before. He's already gone under. All that's left is the wait -- waiting for Fletcher to save him from this, waiting to recover and knit up into something integral, waiting for his bank account to run so deep into the red that they start calling at all hours. That'll even be reassuring, he can cut loose on his creditors and pour out the kind of venom on them they've never fucking dreamed of, because they don’t know what Andrew knows, the secret purities of the universe he learned at Fletcher’s hands. All he has to do is wait.