Andy Bolt

I’m addicted to Kwello St. James. He has the grafted pheromone glands from back when he was a realtor. It’s not that uncommon. Lots of salespeople do it. It apparently greatly increases the willingness of customers to buy from you. It’s also led to a seven hundred percent increase in the number of extramarital affairs. There are rumors floating around that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been using them as a method to boost their rapidly waning numbers. Nothing’s been proven, but it’s otherwise hard to explain their statistically improbable membership jump and the fact that a twenty-year-old professional football player was recently found having passionate sex with a pudgy, fortysomething housewife on a pile of Watchtowers. 

Kwell is different, though. He’s addicted to me, too. I got the cross-glands a few months after we started dating. When we fuck now, it’s more chemical than physical. 

We’re waiting on a Virtu-vision landscape of the dockyards in Thessalonica. I have taken out the people, but I have left the tall, grey ships, oozing thick corrosive agents into the air as they bob in the blue. We’re waiting for the phantom boat, the one that never comes. The landscape is supposed to be a meditative Zen exercise. I am smoking a Red Apple Xtra. I’ve torn the filter off. My eyes feel glassy.

Kwell is wandering aimlessly back and forth in front of the stack of pallets I’m resting on, my knees pulled up under my chin. I am four meters above him and can still sense him, in that pseudo-conscious animalistic sort of way. Every so often, he sighs, looks out over the water, looks up at me, sighs again, and keeps walking. He’s humming “Since We Got Together” by the Rabbit Vandals. It was our song once.

“I’m going to kill myself,” he announces suddenly, cutting off the melody.

I can feel tears flooding my eyes, streaming uncontrollably down my cheeks. It’s been happening a lot lately. The glands have given me an irreversible chemical imbalance.

“Not in the house,” I tell him.

There’s a rehab program for love junkies. The idea, at heart, is that you go in on Tuesday and then never see each other again. Which is fine if you have a heroin problem, but this is a human being. It’s like quitting smoking and going through the worst break-up of your life at the same time. They don’t like to advertise this, but when you factor in the withdrawal, the suicides, and the wildly unpredictable sexual behavior that can result, the program actually has a twelve percent mortality rate. Seventy-eight percent relapse. For those good with numbers, that means you’re actually two percent more likely to die than to get right. 

Kwell looks up at me again.

“I love you,” he says.

“I don’t like you very much,” I say, exhaling a steady puff of thick grey that matches a nearby ship’s.

“Yeah,” he answers, staring out at the deep horizon, his neck veins bulging. “Me neither.”