Firework

Avidiana Contadino is brilliant. There hasn’t been an author like him for decades, and none quite so creative for centuries. His writing style is magnificent, beautiful and fragile like him, but his works are soaked in struggle and bloodshed, reflective of his turbulent childhood as a starving boy in Somalia. Against all odds, he made it to the United States and scraped together enough money to go to college, where he began his career. Somehow producing beautiful literature every year, he wins awards year after year and even owns a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Though only in his forties, his legacy has been cemented and he’s already one of the greats. 

And he’s passed out in my bathtub. 

I sigh and seat myself on the toilet lid as I watch the water seep into his shirt and dark slacks, his mouth open and hot as he makes slight snoring sounds that travel up the tile walls. His limp arm hangs off the side of the tub and his chin is dangerously close to sinking under. As much as I desperately want to leave him to spend the night in the freezing water, I know I should probably drag him out so he doesn’t drown. 

“Alright, man, come on,” I say, reaching over to lightly tap his cheek. He doesn’t move an inch, so I grab his face and shake it hard. 

“Eugh…” he grumbles as he cracks his eyes open, bleary and unseeing. He moves his legs slightly before deciding it’s too much work and he sinks back into his previous position.

“Dude, get out of there,” I tell him, grabbing under his armpits to hopefully tug him out. “You’re gonna drown or freeze or something.”

He groans weakly as I heave his body out of the water. Even soaked, he doesn’t weigh much, and his sopping slacks reveal his toothpick legs. You’d think that someone who struggled to keep an ounce of weight on in his childhood would gorge himself now that he’s rich, but Avi isn’t wired like that. Like a firework, he destroys himself to make something beautiful. 

“Easy does it. There we go,” I murmur to him, propping him against the bathroom wall while I ease off his dripping shirt, peeling it down over his skinny shoulders. I toss it into the tub and unbutton his trousers, meanwhile his head lolls on my shoulder. He manages to bring an arm up and grab a handful of my sweater to steady himself.

“Christ, man. Your keys are ruined,” I mumble as I pull a car fob out of his pocket and toss it in the dry sink. Then I tug his slacks off and manage to wrestle him into my bathrobe. 

“I can’t get home,” he coughs, hazy eyes searching up for mine. 

“You’re not gonna go home. You can sleep here,” I say, forcibly walking him out of the bathroom. I scoot him toward my bedroom and let him fall against the bed. Gratefully, he crawls up and makes himself comfortable. 

I sigh, feeling vaguely like a tired parent managing to get his toddler to bed, and click the light off as I leave the room to spend the night on the couch. 

When I wake there isn’t a sound in the house, a sure indicator that Avi’s still asleep. I spend the morning making coffee and eggs, wondering at what point our relationship becomes a friendship rather than a coworker situation. He spends most of his time at my place, which has to count for something, but too many of those days are spent eating my food or convincing me to go out or not writing. 

That call I received years ago from his team, asking me to work with him–it didn’t feel real. I couldn’t believe Avi was even aware of me, let alone interested in writing songs for me. I spent the first months of our collaboration numb in awe, not realizing he was using me as a guinea pig to branch out into the music industry and make an extra buck from selling songs, all while improving his poetry. Those days, he could do no wrong. 

He gave me a few songs, I sang them, I recorded them, and that was all. He took the royalty checks that go around and promised me that I’d get the money for the next ones, but there were no next ones. He broke our contract and contacted more established musicians, made boatloads of cash from them, too, and ignored my emails and letters from then on. I just wasn’t big enough for him. 

Then, in true Avi fashion, he drank up all his money and fired his team, and suddenly no artists wanted to work with him anymore. He called me, still rude and entitled, asking to work together again. 

Always his lapdog, I agreed. Once again, he took over my life and home. 

Two hours into the morning I hear a creaking door and shuffling feet. Still in my bathrobe, he trudges into the kitchen and wordlessly pours himself a cup of coffee in the little grey mug I have just for him. He looks even rougher, if such a thing is possible, with disheveled hair and purple under eyes. 

“What were you on last night?” I ask him bluntly. He doesn’t respond to me, instead eyeing the pan of eggs and sipping his coffee. 

“Avi.”

“I don’t know,” he sighs. “Sorry for coming here. It was the closest and I forgot my address.”

“But you remembered mine?” I mutter. “How’d you end up in the bathtub?”

“I was hot, alright? I couldn’t cool off and my clothes were, like, stuck to me, so I just–I got into the bath. I don’t know, okay?” 

“You need to go to rehab,” I mutter quietly, my lips pressed to the edge of my mug. 

He fumes when I say that word, but he doesn’t show it on his face. Stiffly, he scratches his hair and sets the mug down. “I need it,” he says quietly.

“Need what? The parties and the drugs?” I scoff. “I can’t believe I entered another contract with you–”

“It’s how I get stuff on the paper, alright?! You’ve never tried it, you don’t know how it feels. Your whole brain just like…goes, all at once, you know? And you come up with great stuff, stuff that sober you would never have thought about.” 

“Look at you! This isn’t the guy I wrote essays about in high school!” I groan. “You suck money and time and energy out of everyone around you, everyone you love–”

“Oh, like you?” he huffs. “I don’t care about you, man. You’re a check–the music industry eats up lazy writing as long as it’s got a beat. It’s like free money.”

“One day, Avi, you’re gonna overdose on something and I won’t be there to fish you out of the bathtub. You’re gonna die and you’re gonna die alone, with your brain somewhere else because you’re not even strong enough to live without some sort of drug in you. These people who you go to parties with are gonna find your corpse and they won’t care and they’re too fucked up on the same damn drugs and they’ll kill themselves within years too. I hope you have your affairs in order, because if you keep going like this it’s gonna happen real damn soon,” I growl at him. 

He stares at me with an expression I don’t know. His hands shake at his sides and he blinks for a while before turning his back. He walks through the house for the next ten minutes, gathering his waterlogged car key and changing into some of my clothes before he heads toward the door, pausing only for a moment to say, “I wish we could have understood each other better,” and stepping out with a final slam. 

I won’t forget sitting on that couch, catching the last glimpse of his neck and hair as he shut the door on me. I’ll sit on that same couch only weeks later, with a throat raw from sobbing, with a grey mug on the counter, growing mold. I will sit there and gaze at that door and hope he’ll walk back through it. I will sit there and wish I hadn’t been so good at predicting the future. I will sit, as I had sat, watching the firework ignite on the ground and travel up, knowing that there is gunpowder inside it and it's only purpose is to explode itself to dazzle me on the ground.