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Negative Buoyancy

His brain had been irradiated, seared.

The morning after. And the room in which he found himself was as cold as a quay, a bus stop. He lay on a couch in an unfamiliar room and tried to keep his mind at a semi-submerged level. Tried to maintain a negative buoyancy.

Odours of sebum and dust. The couch's fabric had a bummy, sebaceous smell. His brain had been exposed to some bleaching flash, some obliterating power surge, but the tepid consciousness of a doomed mountaineer was all he'd need today.

He heard a scritchy sleet paw a window. Grey grey grey. Cold cold cold. His dimly remembered 'hostess' was staying in bed, thank God. But he'd failed to hide a bottle and all the pubs were shut.

Sunday. The obdurate fact of it. A grey smeary fate he feared and hated. Each hour of which was itself a little Sunday—or even a Good Friday. For dolorous and bleak would surely be the stages by which his need for a drink would grow, becoming ever more shrill and urgent, ever more direly biochemical.

His brain had been washed by some obliterating flash. He knew himself to have been cancelled, deleted, rendered white. A Sunday in the very trough, the deepest pit of winter, and he knew himself to be incapable of his usual hustle.

There'd be no fix today. No medicine. He was all out of schemes and all out of fight. He was all out of fight and all out of options.