Running Is a Kind of Dreaming

by J. M. Thompson

  It occurred to me that before Miriam and I went back to Burning Man, where I planned to snort my meth, I ought to perform a dress rehearsal with my newfound substance at home. I decided to do a line while I painted the bicycle I intended to bring with me to the desert. I took the baggie out of my pocket. The baggie contained broken shards of a hard, transparent substance. I poured a few shards onto the kitchen table. I crushed the shards into powder. I rolled up a banknote and snorted the powder. I felt a sharp pain at the top of my nose like the stab of a hundred tiny pins. Within seconds I was swaddled by a blanket of euphoria. I went outside and started painting my bicycle. I was conscious of every brushstroke and every detail of the bicycle—the curve of the derailleur, the cylindrical form of the crossbar, the triangles formed by each pair of spokes—as objects that expanded to occupy the entire sphere of my consciousness with a laser-beam-like focus and a feeling of unwavering absorption. On cocaine this state would last for about ten minutes before it faded. On meth it remained constant for several hours.

  We drove to the desert. Sometime after the Man burned, I crawled into my tent. I poured out the rest of the meth on a paperback book and snorted it. A sphere of crystalline awareness formed around me. I danced for several hours until the feeling began to fade. I encountered an acquaintance who gave me some Dilaudid, an opioid several times stronger than heroin, which he’d found in the medicine cabinet of an elderly relative lately dead from cancer. Another friend gave me a bump of coke and a swig of water in which he had dissolved some MDMA. I was very high. I heard a rumor that the superstar DJ Armin van Buuren was playing a live set at about four in the morning somewhere on the other side of the desert. I biked through the desert and found a crowd of people dancing. The sun came up. I returned to our camp.

  With the sun in my face and drugs in my body, I felt enveloped by warmth and goodness. I understood that my drug taking put me outside the margins of behavior considered acceptable in normal society, and I was aware of the dangers of pushing the limits of what my body could handle. So what? I thought. I felt good. I hadn’t felt this kind of warmth and goodness in years; perhaps I’d never felt it. I was joyous and jumping and alive. I understood that my feeling derived from the chemicals I had eaten. But everything was chemical—wasn’t that the mantra of psychiatry? Sure, meth and Dilaudid carried graver risks than Effexor or Seroquel, but those drugs had done almost nothing good for me, or so I thought, and sometimes seemed to make me feel even worse. If I’m taking drugs, I may as well do the ones that make me feel good. In reality, my prescribed psychiatric medication had done something for me—the feeling of the return of an inner brightness I’d experienced on Effexor and Abilify. But it was a mild improvement. My malaise was undiminished. Leaping up and down to techno at sunrise, high on drugs, it was a fake happiness. But fake happiness was surely so much better than real misery. I could feel good—better than good. Transcendent, joyous, free. It was possible for my brain and body to produce these wonderful feelings: What a discovery! And wasn’t this the point of being alive? What other reason could there be? Surely nobody born on Earth was destined just to struggle through an existence of constant agony, taking pills to numb the pain. I’d stumbled upon the dangerous knowledge understood by every junkie since the beginning of human time. I knew what the lotus-eaters knew. Abandoned by Odysseus on the island with the magic plant that turned his mind into happy mush, the lotus-eater knows his unreal pleasure transports him to much greater wonders than reality could ever match. Odysseus sails off to a home whose existence the lotus-eater has long stopped believing in. Why set forth on the wine-dark seas and battle monsters when there’s this lovely island to stay on? But the deal the lotus-eater makes by staying on the island is never to return home. To take refuge in the unreal bliss on the island means severing the links to real connection and belonging. It is easy to do so when home seems impossibly distant, perhaps even mythical, a story told by liars to trick a sailor back on board a futile journey of endless cold nights at sea.

  Yet the risks were real. I can remember as I finally lay down for a nap around nine in the morning, I could feel my heart beating much too fast. I took some slow deep breaths, but it didn’t help. I felt scared. Oh God, please don’t let me die of a heart attack! I focused again on my breathing, slowing it down, feeling the cycle of my chest moving up and down with each breath, until I felt calmer and then fell asleep.

  Nearly everyone went home on Sunday morning after the burning of the Man. Miriam and I stayed to watch the Temple burn. It took place on Sunday evening. The Temple designer modeled his elaborate balsa-wood construction in a form inspired by the temples found in Bali. He offered the Temple to festival participants as a place of mourning. Throughout the week, the wooden surface of the Temple filled with messages in Sharpie or ballpoint pen and handwritten notes and photographs, honoring loved ones now departed from the world. Burners sat on the ground in prayer or meditation, holding each other and sobbing. And then at dusk on Sunday the Temple was set on fire. Burners gathered in a circle a few hundred feet from the inferno. Some called out the names of their beloveds. As I sat beside Miriam, watching the fire, a great wave of grief and shame and sadness overwhelmed me. I wept.

  “I’m so ashamed,” I said.

  “Why, darling?”

  “I tried to kill myself.”

  “But you were depressed,” she said. “That was depression.”

  Miriam held me in her arms. I felt her forgiveness soak through me. I felt the heat from the fire. I heard the sobs of so many others in mourning all around me.

  AT WORK, I COULD sense my manager’s patience wearing thin. I continued to struggle with the simple tasks she assigned me. I wasn’t sure what else to do for work. I searched for other jobs online. In my emails I wore the mask of the Oxford scholar I once had been. I knew—or thought I knew—the effect this mask had on others. But what choice did I really have? Take off the mask? Then what, and who would other people see? Who would I see? It was possible the others knew I was wearing a mask. Maybe they could see the worry lines on my forehead where the mask fit uneasily on my face. Dear sir or madam, blah blah blah. I must have applied to fifteen random job listings every day, describing the person I imagined the mask was meant to look like. I can be like this, or I can be like that, I said in the mask voice, this character I performed who could take on almost any role. I knew words. Sometimes after a flurry of these emails it was hard to remember whether I wanted any one job more than another. Hard to remember what I wanted other than to be wanted by others. It was pitiful, I thought, how much I depended on this minimal recognition that I mattered and existed. And yet like the bad speed that no one wants to touch until the very end of the night when all the good drugs are gone, I knew this shallow recognition was what I needed to keep my fragile sense of self from crumbling into the familiar feeling of nothingness. Thoughts of alternate future selves flashed from the recesses of my imagination with the desperate ingenuity of C-list Hollywood showrunners crafting lurid plotlines for terminal-phase sitcoms on the eve of network cancellation. Lawyer, doctor, nurse. It occurred to me that I could become an international diplomat. I attended a conference on that field at which the representatives from various prestigious universities stood behind tables stacked with brochures on graduate-degree programs in international relations. I will be Our Man in North America. I cycled almost every day between new ideas of what I was supposed to do when I grew up, and when my mind was especially frantic, sometimes more than once per hour. It was exhausting, this performance. When I faced rejection, I felt empty and sad. When I made progress with any of these random schemes, I felt even sadder and emptier, because my success had derived from a phony imitation of a person I had merely assented to performing. It was hard to be sure which sadness was worse. So at night I sat in my room with Charlie. My mind ran in a billion directions, vanishing into imaginary worlds. But in the morning, when Charlie left and I blinked in the sunrise, I felt much, much worse than before.

/>   IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS my cocaine use ramped up at a rate that ought to have been frightening, had my capacity for fear not been eclipsed by my desire and then need to get high. I started out with gram bags. I proceeded to triple that amount, three-gram bags, or an eighth of an ounce, known in drug lingo as an eight-ball. I met my dealer every week, then twice per week, and then he grew tired of my calls and said I should meet his dealer. That was Martha.

  “You’re not with the FBI or something?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Just a customer.”

  “You don’t look like a regular customer.”

  I mollified her. We went to her apartment. She weighed the cocaine using an electronic scale. I once saw a man there in a dark suit whom I presumed was my dealer’s dealer’s dealer, an individual who perhaps occupied quite a senior role in the drug-distribution chain, alerting me to the reality that I was crossing a border into territory where the stakes were compounded and unpredictable, possibly launching me into encounters with people who might want to rob me or kill me or send me to prison for a very long time. Once when she handed me an eight-ball, Martha said, “Now, you’re not going crazy, are you?” “No,” I said. I was. It was my fifth or sixth eight-ball in about a month. This can’t be good for my brain, I thought. But . . . but . . . but . . .

  There was always a but, a yet, an out. I made little deals with myself. I’ll use tonight, then I’ll take a day off. I broke those deals, and made new ones, which I also broke. I was aware of losing control, of neurochemical forces much stronger than my diminished capacity for long-term foresight, or any sense of responsibility to others, driving my actions. I would hit REDIAL to Martha. “I’d like two hundred, please.” Then I’d drive to Castro Street, walk upstairs to her apartment, hand over two hundred dollars, go back to my car, make a cursory check that nobody was watching, pour some of the coke on the dash, and snort a line without so much as bothering to chop the rocks into powder.

  I would stay awake on coke until 4 a.m., stopping only when the successive diminutions of each euphoric spike flatlined in a stupor. By then all the sharpness and magic from the first few lines of the night had gone, the unmistakable sign that the internal fireworks show was over—the word we used to have in the rave era in England in the ’90s was monged, a kind of depleted zombie sensation of still being conscious and awake and intoxicated but no longer in the least euphoric or energized; of knowing there was nothing left to be done but sleep and allow at least the minimal degree of neural regeneration necessary to do drugs all over again. Then I would go to bed. I knew that my brain was crying out for rest. But snort cocaine for hours and sleep becomes elusive. I would hunt in the medicine cabinet for Vicodin from an old medical or dental procedure, to try to take the edge off, and then I would lie still until the opioid took effect, my heart thumping, a sense of panic building, sometimes wishing I could wake Miriam up and tell her that I thought I might be having a heart attack, but knowing to do so would entail fessing up to the inexcusable reason, so I just lay there frightened, taking deep breaths, until my pulse slowed down. I was fortunate to have avoided a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I could have died. I attribute my narrow escape to a combination of relative youth and solid cardiac health, and an element of sheer dumb luck.

  I narrowly escaped several other potentially ruinous outcomes. One time I was driving through the city, high, when I accidentally ran a stop sign. A cop pulled me over. I don’t remember having drugs in the car, but I’d been up most of the previous night doing coke, and if he’d ordered a drug test, that would have been obvious. I must have looked at least slightly the worse for wear, especially in the eyes of someone like a San Francisco police officer, who sees drunk and high people on the street every day and night and can read the signs of intoxication. “I apologize for running the stop sign, Officer. It was a mistake. I promise I’ll never do it again,” I said, conscious of enunciating every word in impeccable BBC English, as if he’d pulled over David Attenborough on a bad day. A posh voice and white skin kept me out of prison.

  I also remember making little agreements with myself, at first. I’ll jog round the neighborhood, then I’ll treat myself. I would run at a lumbering, sweaty pace for about twenty minutes nonstop on a short loop that started on the sidewalk outside my apartment. I would head down the street, turn right past the local taqueria, turn right again at the corner store, and then head to a nearby park, before circling back to my apartment. I had gained forty pounds from the combined effects of antipsychotic medication and gluttony. For most of the run, I felt slow, fat, and uncomfortable. But I was moving forward. I was running. My body remembered what to do.

  A WHITE SHIMMER APPEARED in the darkness on the screen. Miriam was lying down, her belly covered with translucent gel over which the doctor moved a plastic wand. Our baby would be visible using a new technology known as 4D real-time, which would depict its body in motion, the doctor said. I held Miriam’s hand. I looked at the screen above us and gazed at the white shimmer. A pale wash of fuzzy pixels coalesced in human form at 1:54 p.m. I saw a face. I saw a nose. I saw a tiny arm, moving through the void to the right side of the face, like a wave. Hello, Mama. Hello, Dada. Seven ounces, the doctor said. Heart rate normal, the doctor said: 135 beats per minute. A girl. Miriam cried happy tears. We kissed. I shook the doctor’s hand. I felt a new emotion. It had the echo of feelings long dormant, a sense of wonder at the mystery of creation, the way I’d felt as a boy, staring into the night sky, imagining distant worlds, but mixed with a feeling that seemed altogether novel, the awareness of joining together in the mystery, of participating now as Being’s coauthor, as if what had emerged in the darkness from the shimmer was my own embryonic consciousness becoming real in time.

  Late at night I would sit by my computer, pouring white crumbs of cocaine onto my desk and chopping them into short, skinny columns. How I yearned to recapture the rapture of the first one! It had the excitement of Christmas morning, the wonder of a euphoric and radiant present, wrapped around me. Everything is connected, I would think, rushing down some manic path of introspective derangement in which my every random thought felt interlinked and revelatory.

  I spent many such late nights writing a short story about a time traveler. The action shifted between ancient Egypt and contemporary London. It involved the time traveler’s quest to recover a famous lost manuscript, destroyed in the burning ruins of the Library of Alexandria. By two in the morning I found it hard to focus. The logical paradoxes entailed in time travel proved impossible to resolve. The drugs made my head hurt. But there was an easy remedy to feeling bad on drugs: more drugs. Don’t worry about what this must be doing to your brain. Don’t vex about tomorrow morning. Do another line.

  The self is also a kind of line, a trail linking the feeling of a unitary conscious being across space and time. For the bundle of thought and feeling that you experienced as you five years ago and now, for the self at home and at work and walking among strangers in the street, convention identifies a single legal person, the entity denoted in the English language by a short skinny column: I.

  Once upon a time, every one of us was two. I was Mummy-and-me, hyphenate twin souls linked by connections first umbilical and then emotional. Late at night with Charlie I felt something like that unity again, or how I wished it might have been. Chop, chop, chop: snort another line, and the path I followed traveled back through time, reminding me of how it felt to be vital, joyous, connected. But follow the line that leads into a delusory heaven and you cut the links that keep your feet upon the ground. The me-with-Charlie and me-with-Miriam split into two separate people. I chopped up myself. I chopped up the truth. I chopped up my dignity.

  I stopped trusting myself. Perhaps I never had. I had minimal confidence that if I planned to do something, that intention was something I could count on sustaining even hours into the future. If I made any sort of plan, in my own mind my words had terms and conditions attached to them, inscribed outside the realm of discours
e in six-point font, absolving me from the responsibility to follow through on what I said as a result of conditions including, but not limited to: drug relapse or overdose; feeling hungover and grouchy; feelings of depressive implosion, boredom, procrastination, distraction, spacing out; willful disavowal of my commitment due to resentment projected upon others from ancient unhealed emotional injuries; quitting my job and fleeing for the hills; psychiatric confinement; incarceration; self-injury; or death by suicide. Those were the terms I lived by, despite my awareness that they were unknown to other people, who would never have consented to such terms had they known about them. I didn’t like myself for living this way; at times I disliked my disliking. Sometimes I had memories of a little Catholic altar boy in England, the boy with his hand up with the right answer, the boy racing across the field to the eighty-yard finish line on Sports Day, and I was aware of the man I had become, and how far I had stumbled from any path into a future self that the boyhood me would have considered noble or honorable or worthy, and my heart fell to the ground and would not lift up again.

  I knew that Charlie and I could never last. But so long as my secret romance lasted, I resolved to make the most of it. Everyone was so relieved to hear that I was feeling good again. I saw no reason to disappoint them. Miriam asked me why there was blood on my pillow. “Allergies,” I said. Another time she found a rolled-up banknote with crumbs of cocaine inside it on my desk. “Left over from Burning Man,” I said.

  “I was five months pregnant—we were getting ready to start a family, or I thought we were,” she told me years later. “Absolutely the last thing I could have imagined was that you were doing drugs. You were in your office half the night, writing, and you seemed so into it, and I was so relieved you weren’t depressed anymore—that’s what I wanted to believe, what I had to believe. The signs you were an addict were staring me in the face. But I couldn’t make the connections, because it would have meant really knowing something I didn’t want to know.” I didn’t want to know either.