SATURDAY NIGHT INKHEADS
SATURDAY NIGHT INKHEADS
SATURDAY NIGHT INKHEADS
SATURDAY NIGHT INKHEADS

Riley Passmore

A week before I became a dealer, and months before I learned the true nature of ink, my sister had been missing a year. My sister, the poet. My sister, the genius. She was one of those kids with all the big dreams, all those world changing ideas, and yet a month before high school graduation, she, the valedictorian, disappeared. She had spent her whole life trying to flee our trailer park little town, our lead-filled tap water and smoke-poisoned air, and yet here she would remain. In time, this place, with its dying Main Street and empty gas stations, would become her chapel.

We—that is, my sister’s best friend Delilah and Delilah’s boyfriend Zeke—had assembled a memorial of sorts in the middle of our high school football field a week before the start of our senior year. Our school hadn’t bothered to do another one—not only because she had a memorial the year before, a week after the police had given up their search, but because, in our town, so many people went missing already. The opiate epidemic had hit us as hard as the rest of the Bible Belt, and honestly, the cops had decided, that’s probably what happened to Valerie. She got high in the belly of a shack somewhere, all alone, and overdosed. Never to be heard from again.

Needless to say, I never bought that story.

Sure, our town had more than its fair share of druggies—people like Zeke, for instance—and yeah, even eighth graders sometimes got their hands on fentanyl, but Valerie wasn’t like that. No high school valedictorian just shoots up, lifts a middle finger, and says fuck the world.

“I can’t believe it’s been a year,” Delilah said, her face shining brightly in the oil drum bonfire we’d lit on the fifty-yard line. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” whispered out of the radio in Zeke’s camo-jacket pocket, its antenna silver and gleaming. “I keep waiting to see her, you know? In the halls. I keep waiting for this to be a joke. But it isn’t, is it?”

Zeke rubbed the small of her back, consolingly, and I watched Valerie’s things—her clothes, her hairclips, and her old papers—burn at the bottom of the oil drum, shrivel and blacken into ash. We had gotten together that night not only to remember my sister, but to unremember her. In my hands, I held a book of her poems that, until that moment, had been destined for the flames. If I had to live in a world without her in it, then everyone had to, too.

“Wait,” Delilah said, grabbing my arm before I tossed it in. “We should read it first, don’t you think?” She held my gaze in the firelight, her eyes welling with tears.

“She’s right,” said Zeke, lighting a Marlboro with his smiley-face Bic. “Val carried that thing with her everywhere, scribbled in it every class.” He took a long drag on his cigarette, and blew its smoke into the stagnant night air. “It’d be wrong to throw it in now.”

I agreed, albeit reluctantly, and opened the notebook to a random page. The leather-bound tome had been a gift from when she started high school, but its quality hid well its age. Inside were poems written in Valerie’s hand—letters not scrawled, but crafted, in perfect cursive. At the time, I remember thinking: surely she must have practiced these on another paper, that no one could have written this many poems this neatly on their first try, but then, that was Valerie.

There was also, of course, the other thing that binds this story together: the ink. Paperclipped to the top of the page in a small, transparent baggie, was a thick, black sludge, glistening like motor oil and smelling sickly sweet like honey. Underneath that sweetness, however, was the hint of something else—something metallic. Like the way my hands used to smell when I worked at the gas station, and had been counting nickels and dimes all night.

“Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

“Holy shit,” said Zeke. “I never took Val as an inkhead.” He snatched it from the book, and held it up in the light of the fire. “Wow, you see how thick it is?” He squeezed the plump baggie between his fingers like a wet teabag. “This is the real deal.”

Delilah shook her head. “There’s no way,” she said. “That can’t be hers.”

“Well, it ain’t Mikey’s,” said Zeke.

I shook my head. I’d never even tried pot, let alone ink. I should have felt angry at Zeke, at his glee that Valerie had more in common with him than anyone thought, but in that moment, all I felt was shock and betrayal, a deep uneasiness blooming in my chest. If this really were Valerie’s, if she really were an inkhead, what else about her didn’t I know?

“You had no idea?” Delilah pressed.

“None,” I said. “Maybe the cops were right. Maybe she really did OD somewhere?” I reeled at the thought, but this was long before we learned that you can’t really overdose from ink—at least, not in the way you can with other drugs. “No wonder they haven’t found her.”

Zeke took one last drag of his Marlboro, and then pulled out an old Altoids tin from the other pocket of his camo-jacket. “You know we gotta do this stuff, right?” Delilah huffed, but he continued. He popped open the tin to reveal a short, thin roll of what looked like homemade parchment paper, pulpy and rough, along with a large sewing needle, the kind ranchers use to repair their saddles. “It’s what she would have wanted,” he said, taking out each piece of the kit. “I mean, who else could she have left it for? Who else would be going through her stuff like this?”

His words brought my anger out for real that time. Our mom, Zeke. Our dad, too. I was pissed on Valerie’s behalf, on our family’s behalf, and yet, at the same time, I wasn’t surprised. Zeke was one of the biggest druggies we knew, the guy you went to for whatever kind of hook-up you were looking for. He would have never let any dope go to waste, let alone top-shelf, premium ink.

But the thing was, as angry I was with him in that moment, I was also curious. In high school, I was exactly who everyone thought I was: the completely-average younger brother of the gifted genius, the awkward third-wheel of Zeke and Delilah’s small-town mayhem. Up until that point, I had lived my life as sober as the ladies of the Baptist church down the street.

If these poems and this ink were all I had left of Valerie, I had to admit that, at least on some level, Zeke was right. Maybe she left us the ink tucked away in her journal for a reason; maybe she wanted us to see whatever she saw when she dropped, to feel what she felt.

Because that’s what ink does.

It doesn’t turn your heart into a hurricane, and it doesn’t make you feel bulletproof. It doesn’t lay you out cold on your bathroom floor, and it sure as shit doesn’t ease your pains.

It makes you feel. It makes you see.

You take a needle, or something else just as sharp, and write someone else’s words on a piece of paper, on something like a Post-it note or an old algebra worksheet, and then you read those words aloud. You watch them burn—smolder into smoke—as your lips speak them into reality.

And then, you inhale. Exhale.

You wanna get high? I mean, you really wanna get fucked up? Forget amphetamines. Forget Oxys and Percocets. Breathe people’s dreams. Their hopes. Their fears. Feel whatever they felt in the twilight of their writing corners, hunched over their desks with their typewriters and quills; see whatever images they painted with their words, sculpted with their metaphors.

It’s what I did.

It’s what everyone did.

By the end of that night, by the end of that bag, we were hooked. To take my sister’s poetry, to take the last words she ever wrote, and drop them? There was no greater high. No greater pleasure. We got to feel what she felt in her very last days—her anxieties about the future, the beauty she found in the pond behind our school, the moonlight bathing its surface in cratered white—and yet, we were safe. Her sadness was still hers, and that meant it could not touch us.

But that also meant we were out. We needed more ink. We had used up that entire bag, our lungs heavy with the weight of my sister’s heart, dropping what Zeke had called “the good stuff” until the early rays of dawn peaked over the top of our high school scoreboard. We had stayed up all night, watching the fire in our oil drum smolder into ashes.

“Where do you think she got this stuff?” I asked them, rubbing the empty baggie between my fingers. Delilah stood barely awake, holding a thousand yard stare, while Zeke puffed on another Marlboro and wheeled the barrel under the bleachers. He smiled.

“Oh don’t worry,” he said. “I know where to go.”

And go we did.

That following Saturday night, we piled into Zeke’s old Buick station wagon—or rather, his mom’s old Buick station wagon—and drove to this place he called the Well. Hidden in the basement of an abandoned water treatment plant, it sat about an hour outside Little Rock, and although it would eventually blow a hole through the light of our lives, we didn’t know that yet. Instead, when we arrived right before midnight after a grueling drive, all we saw were gray, derelict buildings in the heart of a gray, derelict industrial center. Row after row of cotton fields stretched far and wide on either side, and in their middle stood the treatment plant’s operations center, a small, one-story building and the basement beneath it. I don’t know how long it had sat abandoned, but the smell of rust from the corroded sedimentation vats hung heavy in the air like diesel.

Zeke pulled his mom’s Buick into park, and killed the engine. The sudden stop jolted Delilah awake in the passenger seat, while I scanned the plant from the rear. Delilah cursed and smacked her boyfriend’s shoulder in annoyance. He shot her a look, but didn’t skip a beat.

“You ever been to a drug house, Mikey?”

I caught Zeke’s eyes in the rearview. “Are you kidding me?”

“Just follow us,” Delilah chimed in. “Zeke’s being mean.”

Zeke chuckled, and we climbed out of the car. Under only the light of the moon, Zeke led us to the small operations center in the middle of the plant, and then around to a rusty utility door that accessed the basement. On its peeling white surface, someone had painted a large black circle with what looked like an enormous sponge brush. Of course, I would later learn that this symbol depicted a well from above, as though you were staring directly into its mouth.

“Well, go ahead,” Zeke said. “Knock.”

I did as I was told, and soon enough, the door screeched open, ever slightly. Inside, I saw a single pair of eyes staring out of the darkness. I didn’t recognize him yet, but they belonged to Johnny, a druggie much like Zeke, except he had a penchant for urban exploration. By the end of the night, I’d learn that it was he who discovered this place, who discovered the Well and the ink. But at the time, all I knew of him was that he graduated the year before, the same year Valerie was supposed to walk and go off to whatever college was lucky enough to nab her.

“You looking to drop,” he asked, “or score?” His voice was harsh, already ink-scarred.

I looked at Zeke, and he gave a nod.

“Both,” I said. I tried to peer deeper into the room, but the lights were low—merely flashlights and lamplights, lighters, and candles. Nothing connected to the plant’s ancient circuit breakers.

“You bring any books?” he asked.

I held up Valerie’s notebook. “Only the one for me,” I said. I pointed to Delilah, and then to Zeke. “But she’s got Plath, and he brought Bukowski.”

Johnny shoved open the door, its bulk stuck on its hinges, and after we walked down a short flight of concrete stairs, we found ourselves in the place that would become our second home, the hole we’d come to spend much of the rest of our senior year. Barely larger than our high school chem lab, the Well was a dimly-lit cinderblock storage room lined with wireframe shelving units and strewn with soiled mattresses, sheets of cardboard, and empty beer bottles. Like us the week before, inkheads sat in groups of three to five, reading whatever words they could find, whatever writing they were brave enough to drop. While I didn’t recognize any of the poetry I heard that night in the Well, by the end of the year I’d know it all, memorized and felt. What I remember most, though, was the air: it stank with teenage funk, and yet was heavy and sweet like honey—like ink.

No one said anything as we entered.

In fact, they didn’t seem to notice we were there.

Instead, Johnny took us to one of the empty mattresses at the rear of the room, and gestured for us to sit. This one was ours. It was also one of the ones beside the only other door in the Well, another rusty utility door labeled CAUTION: ELECTRICAL in big, red, scary letters. Like the entrance to the Well itself, this door had been painted with a large black circle, except this one had been filled in—a glaring black pit. It reminded me of a black hole, and it might as well have been.

“How long you folks staying?” Johnny asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but Zeke cut me off. I had misinterpreted the question.

“One bag’s fine for now,” he said. “We’ve got some freshies with us tonight.”

Johnny chuckled, and Delilah rolled her eyes. I couldn’t help but feel small then, like a child somehow—a frequent experience whenever I hung out with them both. Regardless, Johnny took our cash and headed into the electrical room. When he returned a moment later, he held between his fingers what we came all this way for: a single baggie of brilliant black ink.

I took it from him without question, selfishly, as though it belonged to me and me alone. This surprised Delilah, but it didn’t surprise Zeke at all. I was hungry. When I went to sleep last Sunday morning, after Zeke had driven me home from the football field, I had the realest dreams I have ever dreamt. In them, I sat on the edge of the lake Valerie had written about in her journal, and she was there, too. She didn’t say a single word—but, then again, she didn’t need to. I already knew what she would say; I had already read her poems. She didn’t need to say anything else.

As the night continued, Delilah dropped her Plath and Zeke dropped his Bukowski. She wept, quietly, as though she didn’t want us to know, while Zeke partied the way Zeke always did. Around dawn, we were the only ones left in the Well—us, and Johnny. The guy who had made all this possible. After we finally ran out and our ink wore off, Johnny came to us with an offer: ten baggies each. It occurred to me then, in those blistering morning hours, that he and my sister had undoubtedly met, but I decided to ask him later. I knew I would be seeing him again.

“Whoa,” Delilah said, holding up her hands in protest. “We’re done.”

Johnny smirked, but Zeke spoke up. “Those ain’t for us, are they, Johnny?”

“Not one bit,” he answered. “You folks like ink, right? You like money, too?”

I knew then exactly what he was asking, and I knew my answer before it had even left his lips. I would sell his ink far and wide to all those who needed it, and to all those who thought they didn’t. I would plant myself on every street corner in the state of Arkansas, and I would spread its black blessing like the Gospel itself, the Good News of my late sister Valerie S. Keegan.

“We fucking love money,” said Zeke, but I would’ve sold it for free.

In the weeks and months that followed, our schedule became routine: endure class throughout the week, and spend the weekend dropping and dealing. Despite my complete inexperience, Zeke’s tutelage and Delilah’s connections made work easy, too easy. We may have started small at first, selling to the kids in AP English—the real nerds of the school, the future Valeries—but soon enough we graduated to the football team and the cadets of the ROTC. Our biggest clients? The creative writing club. The ones who not only bought their ink in bulk, but knew enough famous poets to tell everyone else who to drop. By the time the first cold fronts of winter rolled in, we were the biggest ink dealers in town. This also meant that, for the first time in our lives, we had some real money to spend: Zeke replaced the whole front end of his mom’s Buick, and Delilah, God bless her, bought us tickets to see Nirvana. I ended up saving most of mine, but the money I did spend I invested into the Well. I wanted to fill its wireframe shelves with every poem I could find, and give it the kind of collection Valerie would have been proud of if she were still here.

But then, on the very first Saturday of the new year, on the last Saturday before we returned from Winter Break, Johnny said he needed our help keeping up with demand. Up until that point, he had been producing ink entirely on his own—we had been his pushers, nothing more. But since we had been dealing to kids with college-age siblings, and since those siblings had been returning to college and getting their own friends hooked, he couldn’t do it alone anymore. He needed people he could trust, and since we were his most profitable dealers, well. That meant us.

So we piled into Zeke’s Buick like we had done every Saturday since August and drove to the Well, long before any other inkheads usually arrived. Once inside, I took a moment to appreciate the upgrades I had made since we first started dropping: gone were the dirty mattresses and the beer bottles, and present were the Goodwill couches and the coffee tables with the volumes upon volumes of poetry. The only thing different was Johnny himself. Rather than hidden away in the old breaker room packing baggies one by one, he stood outside its door, the one labeled CAUTION: ELECTRICAL. In retrospect, he looked nervous somehow, as though he knew we’d never believe what we were about to see, even though we’d be looking right at it.

And you know what? He was right.

Zeke spoke to him first. He said, “You finally gonna show us how you make this stuff?” He went on about his theories regarding mushrooms, but then Delilah joined in, using her math skills to explain how much we could increase production if we worked in shifts throughout the week. I was the only one who noticed he wasn’t listening—at least, not really. Instead, he looked like he had a bad drop, like he had read something he shouldn’t have, and was reeling.

“He wants to show us something,” I said through the din.

Everyone went quiet, and Johnny nodded. “I know I said on the phone that I need your help keeping up with all the new ‘heads, and that’s true. But there’s a little more to it than that.”

We all looked at each other. “What do you mean?” Delilah asked.

He stared at each of us, as well as into us. Johnny was the most serious I had ever seen him, as serious as a scraggly kid with long, oily blond hair could possibly look.

“It’s better if I show you,” he said.

He wrenched open the CAUTION: ELECTRICAL door, the one emblazoned with the large, black disk hand painted beneath its sign. All this time, I had assumed that we called this place the Well because, after all, where else does ink come from, if not from a well? But there was another reason, as it turned out. The Well was more than a mere metaphor. The Well was real.

Jonny led us inside, and we found a maintenance room about the size of a two-car garage. A row of breaker boxes lined the wall directly to our right, and on our left, a wireframe diagram of the entire treatment plant hung centered on the wall. In the center, however, was not a folding table littered with lab equipment and plastic baggies, nor a hydroponic farm overgrown with Zeke’s mushroom theory, but a well. An actual, cobblestone well, complete with a mossy, shingled roof and a wooden bucket connected to a wench that lowered into its depths. It is beyond understatement to say that this made no sense, that its presence here was all wrong, but at the same time, I didn’t have to peer over into its edge to know what it held instead of water. The room reeked of ink.

Zeke cursed under his breath, utterly bewildered. He walked around it, and I followed. Delilah let us be, standing perfectly still, perfectly quiet in the doorway. All three of us dealt with our shock differently that afternoon while Johnny let us take it in. He then explained that, about two years ago, the well appeared one day as though it had always been here, fully formed and everything. He and his urbex crew had discovered this place like any other, and then one day, the well just was.

Zeke looked over the edge. “How deep is it?” he asked.

Johnny joined him, and I did, too. The closer I came to the well, the stronger the fumes of ink hung in the air. I was beginning to drop, despite there being no words to read. Every breath filled my lungs with the prickle of longing, the embers of hope, the aches of despair and rage. I could see Valerie’s cratered moon lake even then, in the corner of my eye.

“No idea,” said Johnny. “But look.” He pointed to the inkline barely a foot from the well’s mouth—the ink’s surface had fallen at least ten feet. “We’ve dropped a lot in the last year and a half. And the more ‘heads we get, the faster we’re gonna run out. Who knows where it ends?”

Zeke groaned. He was angry. Delilah and I were, too. While no one liked to admit it, we were addicted. Addicted to the money, addicted to the high. Addicted to our school revolving around us and no one else. And like every other addict, we needed these things to function. It’s a difficult thing to consider now—a white hot ball of lead in my gut—but if I’d known I’d be dependent on the well, I don’t think I would have ever dropped that night on the football field. Of course, in that moment, I had something else to consider. Something only Johnny would know.

I met his eyes through his reflection, through his shadow silhouette glimmering on the surface of the ink. I asked him, “Johnny, did my sister know about this? About the well?”

Johnny tore his eyes from mine.

“Mikey,” he said. “Your sister was the first one to try it.”

Everyone thinks they know what they would do were they to encounter the supernatural, that they would be the first to run, screaming, out of their haunted house, but when it’s your life, it’s not that easy. Soon enough, faster than you might think, the supernatural becomes normal, a feature no stranger than a stop sign, or a well where it shouldn’t be. And, then again, it’s not like we had time to consider its biggest questions, anyway—where did it come from? How did it get here? What even was ink, anyway? How did it “know” what to make us feel?

We were just too busy.

After Winter Break, the demand exploded. All those college kids who had come home for Christmas had each left with a baggie of their very own, and within a month, me, Zeke, and Delilah had our whole high school class running as drug mules. The Well, now outfitted with more shortwave radio equipment than a local news station, had become not only the epicenter for all things ink, the very best place to drop in Arkansas, but also the headquarters of one of the fastest growing drug cartels in the country. In a turn of events we could scarcely believe, by February, the three of us, along with Johnny, had more money than any teenager should legally be allowed to have.

Of course, by that point, the world had started to change, too.

Before, two dozen inkheads were barely noticeable, especially in a town like ours. Everyone was already on something, whether it was ink or meth or whatever else, so a few kids skipping AP Psych to read Billy Collins out behind the dumpsters wasn’t exactly cause for alarm. But when, as though overnight, your town gets so saturated with ink that teachers and students both spend their lunches in complete and total silence, when the only thing interrupting that silence is the scratching of needles on parchment paper and the close, huddled whispering of William Carlos Williams and Edna St. Vincent Millay, people start to notice. People like the media and local politicians. Ink was all over the news, and every op-ed columnist in the country had something to say about it—ink was getting ink. Before long, the state of Arkansas tried to ban it outright, saying that it was “harmful to the minds of children,” but when the state’s own expert arrived to testify on its behalf, he was dropping harder than a cinderblock through a windshield. He spent his time on the stand smiling through snot and happy tears, having dropped John Donne’s entire body of love poems only moments before.

So the state gave up, and we continued.

Johnny and I packed baggies on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Zeke and Delilah packed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and all four of us counted mountains of cash every Sunday morning. Saturdays, as they had always been, were reserved for dropping. When we’d arrive, each time the plant’s parking lot would be a little bit fuller, and by the time April rolled around, inkheads from every part of the state were parking in the grass, or in the woods. They’d be lined up for hours waiting to get their next fix, wrapped around the sedimentation vats and queuing under wastewater pipes wide enough to drive a school bus through. Even with the four of us, we could barely keep up. We barely had time to drop our own stashes. Zeke rigged up a funnel system out of spare automotive parts from his uncle’s shop to fill ten baggies at a time, but that still wasn’t enough.

The Well had reached critical mass. Peak production.

One night in May, after everyone else had sobered up and gone home, we lay on our favorite couches while Zeke’s boombox—his upgrade from his pocket radio—blared the news from all over the world. That night’s broadcast? A report from the front lines of a civil war in Eastern Europe. According to a journalist on the scene, at the high point of a climactic battle, a lone soldier walked into the middle of the firefight with nothing more than a megaphone and a strip of paper in his hand. The soldier then read whatever it was he had written—a poem by Polish pacifist Czeslaw Milosz, some said, or a work of Wilfred Owen—and within seconds, every combatant had fallen to his knees in tears, wailing through invisible pain. Ink, in all its glory, had gone international.

How deep is it? Johnny had asked back in January, about the well.

We didn’t know it yet, but we’d soon find out.

By the end of May, the world had gone quiet—or at least, the parts of the world I could see. The school year was coming to a close, the dog days of summer were about to begin, and yet there wasn’t a single sound on Main Street. Not a single moving car, not a single pedestrian. In fact, I realized one day that I hadn’t seen nor heard a plane fly overhead in weeks, maybe longer. And yet, despite that silence, everyone was still here. They just weren’t visible.

They had holed themselves in the library, in the high school gymnasium, in their doublewides, reading and dropping by candlelight. Old ladies’ book clubs had become the new opium dens, each of their members splayed out like runny eggs on their couches, on their day beds, their noses buried deep in the pages of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. The power was out completely once the folks at the power plant discovered The Waste Land, and each and every night from then on, the town fell into an eerie, dreamlike darkness, a darkness not unlike ink itself. Crime itself came to an end, save one felony: once people realized that college freshmen often carried literature anthologies for class, car break-ins increased by a factor of ten. No poem was safe. Years later, whenever I hear the sound of snow crunching beneath my feet, I still think of all that shattered glass.

At the Well, things were equally dire.

No one was speaking anymore. Zeke’s boombox, once a source of constant entertainment, played only static. Even our longest customers, our friends from the creative writing club, no longer had anything to say. Instead, they walked around the plant with shellshocked stares, with blank, glazed-over eyes. In time, I knew all four of us were headed to the same place. On ink, especially with as much as we were doing, we could feel everything. But once you were hooked, once you went from dropping once a week to twice a day, you couldn’t really feel anything without it. The world turns gray on ink, muted, as though you or God has found the contrast knob on reality’s control panel, and set it to zero. After a while, the world becomes a world of only shadows and fog.

“Hey Mikey,” said Zeke, standing at the entrance of the electrical room. His voice sounded vacant somehow, monotone, as though he were forcing himself through every syllable.

“Yeah?” I asked, halfway through a baggie. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard his voice, nor Delilah’s nor Johnny’s, nor my own voice, either.

“I think we hit bottom,” he said.

I looked up from my strip of parchment paper. I had been dropping the same lines all morning, the stanza Valerie had carved into the back cover of her notebook: “Day after day, day after day / We stuck, nor breath nor motion; / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.”

“When?” I asked.

“Just now,” he said. “I heard the bucket hit something, and the rope went slack.”

I closed my eyes for a long, long while, and then peeled myself off the couch. I followed Zeke into the electrical room and found Johnny and Delilah there, too, dropping with their backs against the electrical room wall and Seamus Heaney in their hands. Boxes upon boxes of little baggies lined rows of shelves ready to be filled, while there, in the middle, stood the well as real and unassuming as it always had. The last six months had had no apparent effect on it at all.

Zeke nodded to the well, and I peered into its depths.

The bucket rope fell dozens of feet into the darkness, a blackness so perfect and impenetrable that when Zeke shined his flashlight into its heart, I saw only blackness still. There was no telling how deep it went, even then—100 feet? 200? I knew that should have been impossible, that, frankly, there shouldn’t have been enough rope on the wench to reach that far down, and yet, we never once ran out of rope. Ever. No matter how hard we cranked, there was always enough rope to keep going, always enough to reach the well of precious, priceless ink at the bottom.

“What do we do?” asked Zeke. “Look at all those bags we haven’t filled. We’re months behind. And Mikey,” he said, glancing at Delilah and Johnny, “we’re exhausted, man.”

I tugged on the rope, and heard the bucket hit the bottom.

The rope itself had to be an inch thick, and the wench had been forged from blackened iron, maybe solid steel. It could easily support my weight. Maybe more.

Before Zeke could object, I grabbed the rope with both hands, threw my leg over the well, and descended into its darkness. There, the fumes of ink that had saturated its walls were purer and more potent than anything I had ever dropped. Like the first time I saw the well back in December, every breath I took as I descended filled my lungs with the pain of everything I had ever read. Every poem in the Well, every turn of phrase, every metaphor, every image, flooded my brain to the point of bursting. Like a saturation diver deep in the Pacific, I thought I would explode in that darkness, a depth charge bursting beneath the weight of an alien sea. But by the time I reached the bottom—the mouth of the well now a distant star high above me—I saw nothing but the glass-still surface of Valerie’s cratered lake. Even though I stood in total darkness, I saw only light.

You’ll never guess who I found at the bottom.

Or, more than likely, maybe you can.

Can you become addicted to your own grief? Can a town? What about a state, or an entire world? Ten years later, I have to wonder: maybe that’s what the well was? Somehow, someway, the loss of so much in one place for so long had coalesced into a real, physical thing. I have no idea how it ended up in the basement of that water treatment plant, nor why it had taken the form of a well at all, but its hiddenness makes more sense every time I think about it. After all, no one likes to talk about grief, do they? Instead, we like to hide it—at least, until a poet comes along.

Valerie, as much as we wanted to take you with us when we left that place, that dingy, concrete basement in the middle of nowhere, we couldn’t. I need you to know that. Despite having enough rope to haul a tractor trailer across the continent, the second I reached out to touch your face, you sank into the bottom of that well that, let’s face it, belonged to you and no one else. Me, Zeke, and Delilah, the rest of the ink-dropping world—we were squatters, and nothing more.

So we left.

After I climbed out and confronted the only person on Earth who had to have known where you were, after I tried to summon the rage to kill him and couldn’t do it, after I couldn’t even sob nor scream in that place, we left the ink and we left the Well and we left you.

We climbed into Zeke’s Buick like we had done dozens of times before, except this time, we didn’t know where we were going. Rather than check on our parents, rather than check on our class-mates, we toured our dead state. Our dead world. We drove for hours upon hours, until finally, on the verge of an empty tank, we returned to where it all began: our high school football field. Amazingly, the oil drum we had stashed last August was still there, under the bleachers, waiting for us.

Zeke struck a match, and lit a fire.

“So, this is it, then?” Delilah asked.

I nodded. “This is it.”

Zeke felt around the pockets of his jacket, and found a crinkled Marlboro. “This is the longest we’ve ever gone without dropping,” he said. “What’s gonna happen to us, you think?”

“No idea,” I said, but I could already feel myself coming down. Although the night had fallen fast, I was starting to see color again. I could feel the warmth of the fire.

I took a deep breath, and pulled out your journal.

In the year since, it had suffered all sorts of damage, from knicks and scrapes to splatter stains of ink. At some point or another, I had dogeared every page, high-lighted every passage. It looked more like a preacher’s Bible than a highschooler’s notebook.

After the hundreds, if not thousands, of poems I had read in the last year, these were the ones I had come back to. But isn’t that where all addicts end up, anyway? Chasing that first high, that first chemical rush that changed their world forever?

I threw it into the fire, and we watched it burn. The three of us stood there until morning, as silent as the skies overhead, as idle as painted ships upon a painted ocean.

We were waiting to feel, Valerie.

We were waiting for you.

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