Read Online How to Find Peace at the End of the World by Saro Yen - Free Book Online

a chance to catch fire so far. Once I’d left a pot of chicken soup on the stove before being called away for six hours and though there’d been a lot of smoke (my entire apartment smelled like burnt metal for a month) and the alarm had almost screamed itself out (the neighbors were probably too stoned to do much of anything) all I’d ended up with was a broken resistor on my stove and a rock hard clump of ash and a pot with a burned out bottom. Though nowadays who really has time to cook eggs on the stove? Cereals and microwaves don’t suffer the same consequences after being left unattended.
    I crest another overpass and the downtown skyscrapers loom into view again, that smoking hole burned into the face of Heritage and the tail of a jet liner sticking out, like giant cigarette had been snuffed out in the face of the office building.
    Jeeesus.
    I so need a smoke.
    I want to be at Westley’s more than anything right now (well maybe not more than being in Amy’s arms). I want to plop down into his giant, floppy couch and have him hand me an already loaded pipe and just blaze up and forget the world for a few hours.

Then I remember all the dank, mysterious buds I’d found in the tight shorted lady’s house. I step on the brakes, much more suddenly that I realize. For some stupid reason I felt I was going to miss an important exit. Then I realize what exit I’d been thinking about.

No. No way.

But why not? Why not stop and see Westley? Or at least if Westley is still there... He’s on the way. A few more hours won’t hurt, will it? “Will it Teresa?” Teresa shakes her head. No. Of course not. All right then.
    I dodge a few more wrecks for a couple of miles and then take the Scott exit ramp before the downtown split. I’m held up when I get to a clog of cars on the Scott elevated and have to backtrack (no way I’m going over the clog Big Foot style on the elevated, forty feet into the air). This, I have to admit, is a new sensation for me. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I guess the societal programming is just wearing off. I’m actually quite enjoying now driving whichever the fuck way on the freeway that I please. I U-turn into the feeder exit under the Scott ramp and tread the same familiar way to my drug dealer’s house.
 
    Driving down the street I almost feel normal again. Wes doesn’t live in the most respectable neighborhood to begin with but it seems to have escaped a lot of the crashes and burning wrecks that make the other areas look like a warzone. Normally there’s very little commerce, except of the clandestine variety. Only the rare visitors looking for a hit, or to visit the many brothels where women are kept coked out, addicted to their next fix that they can only earn seeing johns. I never patronized, of course (well, beyond the moral implications, there was always the risk of contracting something seriously nasty), but they were always pretty apparent when you passed them by: the large wraparound porches always contained half naked and overly friendly women that spilled out of the house in much the same way that their ample bodies spilled out of the skimpy clothing they wore. All of the porches are empty, of course. All gone now.

I park in front of my dealer’s house. It feels so strange when I get out. I’ve parked here and gotten out so many times before and I’ve always heard a dog barking in some proximate yard. Now there is only a much too still silence.

The front door is closed and locked. Furthermore, there is an iron gate over the door, and I happen to know in the middle of that door is a one inch thick slab of solid steel. All the front windows are similarly barred. One of the necessities of being a drug dealer, I guess. In one such visit he had told me all of the every workaday precautions he took. The windows in his car, a very expensive luxury sedan hidden away in the detached garage in the back, are made from ten layers of laminated glass and can take fire