[sic]: A Memoir by Joshua Cody Page A

Bring Me Down. She was shaken up, trembling. Of course, she was always shaken up and on the verge of trembling. But she was awfully pale. She had just come from my apartment.

    “I have something to tell you that’s very difficult for me to say.”
    She glared at me through the corner of an eye, gauging whether I was prepared for a momentous and disturbing revelation, a horrific item that concerned not only her but me.
    Note to reader: if you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in a close relationship with someone who has a life-threatening disease, and for whom conventional treatment has failed, and who is facing a “salvage” treatment that itself is life-threatening, DO NOT DO THIS. Because your friend will know what I knew, not imagined, feared, nor thought: Sophie had just talked to a nurse; this nurse was surprised that Sophie hadn’t been informed I was going to die that afternoon.
    “I was cleaning your apartment, and I found it,” she said.
    Found what? I wondered. I couldn’t think of anything. A mildewed washcloth? Doubt it. Dirty laundry? Couldn’t be, everything was at the cleaner’s. Pornographic literature? Probably not—how would she know? It’s all in French.
    The glare was now bitterly accusative—I’d forced her to say it. “The cocaine.”
    Cocaine? I hadn’t had a line of cocaine since that one night way back in October or November or whenever it was, when I hit the Golden Ratio. And I’d only ever actually had any in my apartment once. I’d never bought any. I might have had some pot laying around—a drug-dealing friend of mine had given me some for the chemo, but I never took to it. I suppose it was possible that there was a dollar bill folded into triangular eighths with some cocaine in it somewhere, an accidental residue from one of the rare points in the past when I had in my possession a dollar bill folded into triangular eighths with some cocaine in it.
    No, she said, it was a whole bag. She’d found it on the bookshelf. She stared at it longingly for hours. She almost did a line. It would have sent her back straight to hell. All of her effort, all of her work against addiction, for naught, because of me. I almost killed her.
    Luckily—she had no idea where she found the strength—she flushed it down the toilet. Again, I thought of Goodfellas : Lorraine Bracco in her bathrobe, with a firearm in her panties, flushing sixty thousand dollars’ worth of powder into the sewers of Long Island.
    “How much was it?” I asked Sophie. And I wanted to ask her—Did you have a firearm in your panties?
    She was crying. “I just wish you the best. But I cannot be around a cocaine addict. It’s too dangerous for me. I’m so sorry for you. I wish you the best, and I hope you have the strength to seek help. But I can’t be that person.”
    Still, I felt as if I had to offer her something; I felt so guilty, having come so close to horribly murdering her. “It could have been some of that stuff Mike gave me back in October, but I really don’t—”
    Sophie put up a thin pale elegant wrinkled dry hand. “Stop. Please. Don’t make this harder than it is.” She came over to the bed, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and walked out of the hospital room and out of my life.
    •
     
    A COUPLE OF years later I saw her again. She might have e-mailed me, or contacted me through Facebook, which I re luctantly joined at the insistence of an unfortunate (for me) dalliance. Or maybe we ran into each other on the street, or in a restaurant. That might have been it. It was nice to see her. She looked great. She had been struggling a little with her design career, but things were looking better. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but we agreed to get together for coffee in a couple of weeks. Lo and behold, in a couple of weeks, she called me as I was walking downtown to Battery Park to see a film. This time it sounded as if her teeth were clenched.
    “Do you want to get a