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Chapter Fourteen


I woke up face-down on a cement floor, my cheek pressed against the base of a toilet. I could still hear the drum beat - far off and thumping... thumping... thumping... though I could no longer distinguish if it existed inside or outside of my head. "Meira --" I choked on the name, and felt a rush of nausea rush through me. "Oh Jesus." I closed my eyes, feeling the world spin around me like I was on one of those tilt-a-whirl rides. I grabbed the seat of the toile and pulled myself up. The basin was filled with throw-up and the smell of it made my stomach churn. "Oh Jesus." I pushed myself away, up to my shaky feet. "Where the hell am I?" 'Cos this certainly wasn't Carl's basement.

I fumbled out of the bathroom stall and staggered to the sink that stood opposite the narrow room from the stalls. Along the wall to my left was the urinals, but I was alone in the room. I reached for the faucet and turned on the water, bending low to splash it across my face.

I felt like I'd been punched in the head - and the gut - several hundred times. Like maybe I'd been run down by a Mack truck or had the shit beat out of me or was hung over or had just come off a horrible drug trip or something - maybe all of those things at once even. Meira did not make it sound like time travel would be so hard, I thought. She made it sound like it was a breeze. Just like waking up, my ass, I thought bitterly. I looked up a the mirror over the sink.

"What the actual fuck!" I yelped and I backed up in shock - right back into the stall and onto the toilet I'd woken up beside, tripping backwards and landing on my ass on the seat.

I reached for my face. Chubby. Stubble along my chin. Longish, sorta-bowl-cutty hair. My hands shook. I looked at them. "What the hell, what the hell?" I gasped, staring down. My hands - I mean they were my hands but they weren't my hands. At least not my current hands. Not the hands I'd had for the past few years. No these were my old hands, my hands from before. My fat hands. My hands before I got my act together. They looked swollen and the nails were bitten into rough, odd shapes and they were yellowed from nicotine and whatever the hell else I was smoking in those days.

Pretty much everything.

"Oh! Je-SUS," I muttered.

Was time travel supposed to make me become the person I literally was in 2006? I wondered. Somehow I'd pictured more like there being two of me. New me and old me, kinda standing side by side and being like well shit Nick you cleaned up good, I know thanks and boy did I look like crap back when I was you or something. Not this. Not... not this.

I stared out of the stall at the mirror where my horror-stricken face stared back. My 2006 face. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..." I whispered.

Suddenly, while my brain was still trying to process just what in the fuck might've gone wrong with the whole time travel thing, the door to the rest room banged open and Kevin walked through the door.

"NICK!" Kevin's eyebrows were especially dirty-brow-licious as he banged through the door and rounded the corner, spotting me sitting there on the toilet. "God damn you." He came at me like he was gonna tear me to pieces and grabbed me by my elbow. "There you are." He yanked me to my feet.

"Were you lookin' for me?" I asked, confused. I felt like I'd been in this bathroom all my life.

"Was I looking for you??" he asked, an incredulous tone to his voice, "Was I -- Seriously Nick? Seriously?" He shook his head. "Get out to the god-damned tour bus. You're lucky we didn't just leave your pathetic ass here." He prodded me to move ahead of him.

I moved along, glancing back at the mirror one last time as Kevin forced me out the bathroom door and down a ghetto ass hallway, through a bar that reeked of alcohol and drugs and sex. On a stage beyond was a girl dancing on a pole, a bunch of guys enshrouded in thick smoke watching her. "This place is disgusting, you probably caught some kind of fucking STD just laying on that bathroom floor," Kevin grumbled as he shoved me out the door, past an amused looking bouncer.

It was fucking cold outside, considering Carl had said June. The stars were hanging in the sky and as I stumbled out across the street I saw a couple of the signs on the bars that lined the seedy looking street were in German. A tour bus idled on the sidewalk and through the window I could see Howie peering out with a concerned expression on his face. The door opened as Kevin and I approached and he thumbed up the steps. "In."

I wasn't sure what I'd done to piss Kevin off so bad, but I didn't wanna piss him off worse by asking or anything so I scrambled up the steps into the bus. He followed and the doors closed behind me with the hiss of a vacuum seal.

The other three guys were sitting on the long couch that lined the inside of the bus, like a peanut gallery. AJ bore a guilt-ridden expression, Howie a look of concern, Brian one of disgust and Kevin of disappointment. I looked around at them all.

"So much for fucking trying," Kevin said, his voice rough. He shoved by me and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

I stood there, stupified. If this had happened before, I had no recollection of it.

I glanced around at the other guys.

Brian sighed, shaking his head, "I hope it's worth it Nick," he said, "Everything you're throwing away." And he walked off toward the bunks in the back of the bus. AJ followed after Brian without saying anything at all.

I looked to Howie who was staring down at his lap. "What'd I do wrong?" I asked.

Howie looked up, eyebrows raised, "Really, Nick?" he asked. "If you don't know what you did wrong... then... there really isn't much hope that me explaining it to you is going to help any." His voice was edged with just a hint of disappointment, peppered by shame in me. He got up. "This has gotta stop, Nicky," he said quietly. "You're pushing us all away and I dunno how much longer we can hold on."

I watched as Howie walked away down the length of the tour bus, his hands in his pockets.

I sat down numbly, completely mind-fucked.

I stared at my hands.

Was it all a dream? Was the past seven or eight years of my life not even real? Had I passed out in a bathroom and had one hell of a drug trip and dreamed the entire thing about cleaning up and getting sober and my liver and Meira and everything? Was Meira even a real person?

I closed my eyes.

I could still see her brown eyes staring into mine. "Nick, don't forget me!"

I opened my eyes.

Kevin was standing in front of me, staring down at me, his eyebrows cinched together in one harshly thick line across his forehead. He sat down. "What do I gotta do to make you see how much seeing you like this breaks my heart?" he asked heavily.

My throat tightened at his words.

"I can't watch this Nick. I can't watch you fall apart. I love you too much, man."

Like a hazy image, I started to recall the conversation.

"I can't do this anymore," Kevin said thickly. "I just can't. I can't watch you piss away everything we've worked so hard for, everything you've worked so hard for. You swore to us that you were better, that now that Paris was out of your life you were stronger, you were gonna clean up. Remember that? Remember when you swore to me you were gonna do better?" He had tears in his eyes. "Nick, I've watched enough people I love die. I can't watch you do it to yourself. You're gonna die and I can't watch it."

"I'm sorry," I croaked.

Kevin shook his head, "You're not sorry. But you will be. Eventually." A tear fell across his cheek, drawing a long, wet trail along behind it. It rolled off the edge of his jaw and my stomach felt like it was curling around my heart and squeezing. He stood up. "I think - I think when this tour is over -" he paused, took a deep breath, "I think I'm gonna be - done."

"No," I whispered.

"I went through this with AJ, I ain't doin' it again with you," he shook his head. "Until you clean up and prove to me you're clean, I'm done."

"Kev - I - Please."

Kevin shook his head. "Good night, Nick."

"Kevin."

But he walked away, leaving me sitting there alone.

I put my hands over my face, bending forward toward my knees and peeking out at my shoes. I couldn't go through all this bullshit again, I thought. I couldn't. I'd barely made it through the first time.

"Meira," I cried, "Come back."