Carl was asleep and then, in a unit of time heretofore unexplored by science, he was awake, and violently so. His head had been stuffed with barbed wire, cleverly hidden inside glasses of bourbon, and his stomach felt like it died last week and was now a rotten corpse. Falling out of bed, and also throwing up, he landed on the thick carpet of clothes and garbage that covered the actual carpet of his bedroom (the actual carpet of his bedroom was thickly matted with various fluids accumulated throughout the years and it's best not to think of it an hour before or after you've eaten).

He contorted himself into the fetal position and prayed that his roommate would suffer a psychotic break, come into his room, and chop his head off.

This did not happen.

Instead, Carl stayed motionless on the floor for several hours, until he felt like he could move without his eyes exploding or his guts falling out his ass. He sat up, and the room was a tornado or maybe those spinning teacups at Disney World. Or he was inside a dryer... no, one of those carnival rides that pins you to the wall with G-forces. He sat crosslegged, hands keeping his head from detaching from his body and splattering against his Evil Dead poster like a thrown watermelon. After a century or an election cycle or several Olympics had come and gone (or possibly five minutes), Carl made a move towards the vertical. Every bone in his body, now coated in lead or whatever that stuff is that makes Wolverine a badass, cracked and clattered and threatened to break apart. But they held true, as had they always. Good old bones, thought Carl (not really, mostly Carl thought about vomiting again). Thrust upward and standing, the room rotated a bit then settled. It rocked as if sitting in the lap of an old granny out on her porch, then it didn't. Though covered in his own vomit, and caught amid the funhouse gyrations of his usually very stable bedroom, Carl did not vomit again. This, he felt, was a major accomplishment. One worthy of at least a Golden Globe. Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize or something. Something that would look flashy on the mantle.

Carl's mind tended to wander.

He walked out into the apartment and was immediately punched square in the nose by a fist of stench. He doubled over and gagged, but brought up nothing of interest.

God, it reeked.

His eyes watered.

It felt as if a tiny, hateful gnome was spin-kicking his gag reflex.

He stumbled forward into the living room and immediately saw her... a beautiful her... asleep on the couch. She was so very naked. And pale... incredibly pale... her body seemed to give off light like a florescent bulb. Her hair, black, was even blacker by comparison. The encroachment of nighttime on a beautiful day. She had eyes of the bluest skies and if she thought of rain... well, it wasn't anytime recently. She was also not blinking. Or moving. Or breathing. It occurred to Carl that something was very, very wrong.

Carl literally had no concept of what would happen next, so he thought about movies. More specifically, he thought about what happened in movies when a person (such as himself, though played by someone much more handsome), found an unmoving, not-breathing, body of a girl with skin like light and eyes like hair metal lyrics.

He should check her pulse!

So he did.

There wasn't one.

He should see if she was breathing!

He already knew she wasn't, so he didn't bother with that step.

He should...

He... should...

He poured himself a stiff glass of bourbon from the bottle lodged between the couch cushions and sat himself down beside her, absentmindedly playing with her toes as he drank. This was probably it for him, he thought. He assumed he'd get blamed for her death. Hell, he thought, maybe he'd actually caused it. He couldn't, strictly speaking, remember anything that had happened the night before. Or the previous night. Clearly things had gotten out of hand.

He finished his drink and poured himself another.

He turned on the TV and watched an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the one where Geoffery's son shows up and steals money from Will. Carl laughed too loudly at the jokes and tried his hardest to not look at the life sentence that lay to his left.

Carl poured himself a third drink. Halfway through said drink, his brain... not the clearest of horizons to begin with... began to fog over. Things got spectacularly calm. He felt as if his body were being lifted up towards the water-stained ceiling and that he would smoosh right through it, as if it were marshmallow fluff. He felt the cool air of outdoors on the parts of his body that weren't crusted with puke. He rose into the atmosphere and into the silence of space. He breathed in the stars and exhaled out planets and galaxies and alien civilizations.

The door being kicked in brought him back to Earth.

The room was filled with people, suddenly, like teleportation was real. There were uniforms that signified various things, and his roommate was in a corner crying and pointing. He raised his glass to toast the new arrivals and someone stuck a gun in his face.

The phrase "you did the right thing" floated across the room, and Carl was fairly certain it wasn't directed at him.

He was pulled up by his collar and spun quickly around. He dropped his glass as his hands were pulled behind him. His wrists were clamped and pinched and he couldn't move his arms. Not that he cared. The fog was creeping back into his head. It was like the hands of Andre the Giant gripping his skull, squeezing, but in a way that conveyed nothing but love. Everything was fine... fuck, so fucking fine. The fog, though, was just a temporary thing. Thought it had just arrived, already it was pulling back, perhaps due to the large man yelling about how he had the right to remain silent right in his ear (the irony was lost on Carl). The hangover was subsiding too. As the sick and the fog drew back, he felt what was left. His baseline emotion. He felt nothing. The biggest nothing ever to exist (or not). Down to his very core, there was a numbness usually associated with mountain climbers dying from hypothermia. The noise of the room collapsed in on itself. Carl's ears heard a fake silence, but it was a silence nonetheless. He looked at the poor girl on his couch. So pretty.

He wished he could remember her name.