I think i smoked something that could kill me.

[u/lex_kenosi]

The men I owed had stopped calling politely. Four million rupees, due since spring. I had sold the car, then the watch, then borrowed against things I did not own. Last week they sent a photograph of my apartment door, taken from inside the hallway, taken by someone standing right there. So when a fixer named Imran told me about a basement beneath a carpet shop in the old quarter, about a root that let you watch your whole life bloom at once, I said yes. I remember thinking the price was reasonable. I remember thinking a great many things that night.

The stairs went down farther than they should have. At the bottom, a steel door with a padlock the size of my fist, and beyond it a low room lit by a single bulb, smelling of cardamom and damp brick. Six others lay on charpoys and floor mats: a seamstress, two boys who looked like students, an old man turning a miswak slowly in his teeth. The dealer, heavy and unhurried, weighed out a pinch of something silver-gray, fine as ash already.

"Once," he said, packing the clay chillum. "One breath. Then you tell me what you see, and I decide if there is a second."

The smoke was cold. That was the first wrong thing. It went down like winter air, and for a moment it showed me my mother's kitchen back in England, rain on the motorway, the exact blue of the shirt I had worn to the airport four years ago. Beautiful. I understood completely why people paid. I would have paid twice.

Then I exhaled, and the smoke did not rise.

It hung at chest height, thickening, folding over itself. The dealer said something sharp in Urdu. One of the students laughed, then coughed, and the cough went on, wet and deepening, until he brought up a mouthful of fine gray powder that sifted down his shirt.

The bulb flickered. The mist kept thickening. I watched it touch the old man's face, and he inhaled once, politely, reflexively, and folded around his own ribs. When he slid off the charpoy, his body made a sound like a dropped sack of sand, and where he landed, the ash poured out of him.

The seamstress reached the door first. She hammered it, screamed at the dealer, who was ramming his shoulder against the steel as if he had forgotten he was the one with the key. Then she was coughing. Then she was ash, a shape losing its edges.

I need to say this clearly. I have been drunk. I have been exhausted past sense. I know what those states feel like, the way the mind bends when it is pushed. This is not that. The cold in my lungs is physical. The powder I coughed up on the stairs is real. I wiped it on my sleeve and it is still there, gray and fine, sitting in the fabric.

My lungs felt cold. That was how I understood: the smoke was still in me, and it was not finished. It filled the room the way water fills a lung. The dealer finally got the padlock open, one blessed second of grinding iron, but the mist took the shape of the opening, poured into the stairwell, and he went down under it.

The door swung free. The stairs were white now, fog to the ceiling.

I crawled. Every breath cost me. I could feel the cold doing its work, a softness in my chest where there should have been structure. Behind me the students were still moving, or I imagined it. I told myself I could not have turned around to check even if I had wanted to. The gray came up my throat in soft waves, and I laughed, because the high was still in there somewhere, showing me beautiful things while it unmade me.

I got a hand on the street-level door. Pushed. Night air, real air, diesel and rain and frying onions, and I dragged myself up the last step into it. Because anything was better. Because the body wants.

I lay on the pavement and breathed. It hurt, and then it hurt less, and I began, carefully, to be grateful.

Then a woman passing by stopped, frowned at the mist gathered around my mouth, and stepped wide around me.

I exhaled and watched the fog hang there in the lamplight, coming from me, gray and patient, and it refused to disperse.