A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  Instead, if you know lots of different kinds of people in Germany, someone will eventually call you a colorful dog. It’s endearing, if you happen to be a dog lover.

  In the ancient beer-soaked German city, I caroused into the night with French law students, Rumanian pre-meds, Turkish philosophers, and even a few dreamy-eyed Germans. I smoked stinking Gauloises and drank too much Sekt and listened to my unshushed laughter ringing off the cold stone walls of castle masonry. I walked the way of the Philosophers and practiced academic arguments in a tongue that made me feel ancestral, and complex. My stunning humiliation—and my follow-up failure to recover—were as inevitable as Nietzsche and the death of God.

  Now, on the mountain, everything went still. I didn’t know anyone. There wasn’t anyone to know, and nowhere to fall from. I shrank to my original size. I faded to my natural drab coloring. I retreated to my original monolingual thinking. And I began, very quietly, to hallucinate.

  It seems very strange that in all that abundance, in the midst of so much offering, I lost all interest in food. Something about the smell of good things cooking caused a terrible sadness to wrap itself around me. I turned my face away from sun-ripened tomatoes and everything they stood for. I was drawing something else from the plants on the mountain, in the two weeks I was alone with them.

  When I watered the squash plants in the brief cool sigh of dawn, I saw them breathe with deep relief, as if the short night, with only dust and dew to drink, had been too long. I saw how blue those deep-veined leaves were. I saw purple shadows in the yellow flowers. When I watched the glow of a far-off lamp outlined in equally distant window frames, I wondered how the painter made that light so shiny, made it glow like a lamp in the window of somebody’s home. Something silent happened on that mountain, something only monks and outlaw mystics ever think to strive for.

  I became acutely aware of exactly how many bites of food were necessary to carry out a certain set of motions. I could feel it, when my hand wanted to put one more cashew than I needed into my mouth. It wasn’t a hunger cue, because the hunger quickly became something like a quality of light. It was a constant energy that animated and illuminated, but only as long as the conditions for it were absolutely perfect. The hunger itself was hungry, and I contained it with small pieces of dried fruit; with biscuits and berries and little arrangements of unsalted nuts. The hunger was a fire that I built just hot enough to temper a blade with an edge so sharp it would shatter if it ever struck a bone.

  There is a slow-motion brinksmanship to giving up food, because you know things could get very bad. You could burn your house down. You could fall on your sword. But when you are hungry to the point of not being hungry anymore, you begin to think quite explicitly about the luxury of time. Things take so much longer than you ever knew. You have all the time you need to become something—to digest yourself in your own toxic enzymes and emerge as a poisonous beauty.

  Alone on the mountain, I had long assignations with Enid and a pair of colored glass containers: a vase, I think, and a globe. I remember staring, for great slabs of time, with a brush in my hand and the rich, heart’s-blood heaviness of oil paint hanging in the air. Everything was motionless, and silent. The world throbbed with secret significance.

  “YOU WILL NOT,” Alizarin cried, with her infallible instinct for entrances, “believe it!”

  She dropped her woven testicle-shaped purse onto the counter. It slumped against the coffeemaker in a flaccid jumble of knick-knacks and chap stick and burst-open bottles of sunscreen. She turned to me triumphantly and announced,

  “I finally found out what happened to Hannah!” She was extremely alert, the way some people are when they have just traveled at great speeds through multiple time zones.

  “You remember Lillian,” she went on, then changed her mind immediately. “No, of course not. I keep forgetting what a kid you are. Just like your dad, all that gray hair when he was only twenty-eight years old. Anyway. Lillian. She’s calling herself something else now, what is it? I just stayed with this woman for three days on the kibbutz, come on! My brain! I know her name is not Lillian anymore, what is the Hebrew name for Lillian? Anyway. My good friend What’s-Her-Name. Her stepdaughter’s cousin Hannah, in Chicago? She would have been about the age you are now.”

  She shot me a sharp look, the way people do when they describe the horrible things that happened to someone just like you.

  “Hannah started taking lithium, of all the horrible things,” she went on, with angry gaiety. “Back in the 80s, when it was supposed to be this miracle drug. It sounds like nuclear waste, doesn’t it. Lithium. Probably just about as good for you. But she was so miserable. She was in this horrible program at the whatever Institute of Higher Something or Other. And the expectations from her family! Even Lillian! But she’d always been so good in school and then she went to work at this all-night diner and she thought, if she didn’t get her degree, she’d be schlepping breakfast at three o’clock in the morning for the rest of her life. Everyone was sure she’d make it, just power through, better living through chemistry, right, and then, BAM! Just like that. Right out in front of a garbage truck. People on the sidewalk saw her waiting for it. I don’t know why they didn’t do something. People are always so afraid to interfere.”

  It was impossible to determine what level of interaction was called for here. I wanted to protest the implication, but I couldn’t even be sure she was implying anything.

  Her attention fell onto my canvases. “You’re having trouble with your backgrounds, I see.” She regarded my images of Enid, where the lovely adornment floated in unpainted space. She was languorous and unfashionable, like faded photographs of grandmothers, who always look demure.

  But if Enid was an airy creature, dangling in streaks of burnt sienna without a point of reference, I was quite clearly made of clay. I was so dirty, my clothes all looked like they were the same color. I had surrendered to an unhygienic entropy, which has a certain voluptuous, falling-down feel to it, like giving up always does. Getting past the first stages of discomfort is a little like losing your appetite after you’ve missed several meals—though I will admit it lacks the quality of light, the frisson of burning houses, and shattering blades.

  There is a peculiar sense of luxury in the decision to abstain from readily available necessities. It feels like willpower, but really, it’s something else. When you begin to yearn for more self-deprivation; for more instances in which you must deny yourself; that is a form of greed. More! You whisper to yourself. More less. You begin to feel like someone you heard of in a story, a long time ago. If this were real, you tell yourself, I would be one of the ones who lived to tell my tale.

  You begin to wake up very early, so you can go to sleep before you have to turn on the light. And then you work late anyway, in the glow of a lamp that casts a perfect circle of illumination, beyond which sometimes, when you finally remember to look, you think you may see fixed and staring yellow eyes.

  “I was saving water,” I explained. “For the ladies. For the garden.”

  AND JUST LIKE that, my two weeks on the mountain were over. I had another piece of something to tuck into my magpie’s nest of a life, another shape with edges that might eventually align with something else. I had been collecting these shapes, but in a haphazard way. I was a hoarder, not a collector, because collectors seek out increasingly precise objects to create a coherent body of work, which they then archive in a tasteful and well-organized manner. But I had not even begun to apply the basic lesson about how pictures are a series of interlocking shapes. Even Enid, in her cloud of burnt sienna, had nothing to hold onto, nothing to indicate how large she might be in relation to mountains or mice; how far away she was from the horizon, or what she was doing on someone else’s piece of canvas.

  I swam in the river on my way back to Foxglove, where I lived my real life, with other human beings. Where I ate things and bathed and came inside when the sunlight dazzled my eyes. Where time faded into the back
ground, like a radio that’s always on, though no one ever pays attention to it.

  By now, I was as impervious to cleanliness as a tar slick. Even after I dried off on my dirty shirt, I was smeared with oil paint. My fingertips were gloved with pot resin, hardened into crusts by the cold clean currents of the Russian River. I didn’t bother trying to scrape it off. My stains were a badge, an indication that finally, I was being honest about who I was and what I did. I was a trimmer, and I was a painter. The signs were there to be seen, by anyone who knew what to look for.

  I should mention that pot resin is basically raw hash, which is some of the most concentrated material in the cannabis plant. Smoking pot made me feel like I had the flu or a bad case of existentialism. It made me feel jet-lagged. I didn’t like it much. What I did like was the transdermal buzz I got from cleaning pot without gloves. As my body heat slowly warmed the resin that got onto my skin from handling the buds, the active ingredients crept into my bloodstream and made themselves at home. The gradual come-on felt expert and subtle, like the photographic image of brilliant thoughts, slowly taking shape inside my mind. I didn’t even feel like I was stoned as I sat there cleaning weed. I thought I might be cultivating a special style of mindfulness. Maybe I was even becoming enlightened.

  My confidence receded as I drew closer to Foxglove. I began to find the signs of legal enterprise oppressive. I felt like a hastily prepared spy in the culture wars as I drove through town, past places where people received paychecks to do things they could talk about with anyone; where they lived by municipal codes and worked openly in gardens by the curb.

  Foxglove was just beyond the city limits, tucked in between a disused logging road and a creek with shining stones. Trees with great mazes of exposed roots bent gracefully over the water, where steelhead trout flashed in the sun for several glistening moments a year. I parked my nearly crippled truck in the circular drive. It looked rude there, like it belonged to someone who lacked the common courtesy to show up in a decent vehicle. I grabbed my grubby bag and started down the flagstone path between two hedges of silvery lavender. Everything was hard and bright. I felt like I should have been wearing shoes from somewhere else to make the proper sound on those stones.

  The windows at Foxglove made me think about light, how light could be cool as a corpse or hot as a murderous rage. Alizarin used the phrase “slab of light” when she showed me how to lay in clumps of high-calorie Titanium white, so creamy they made a person want to lick the canvas they’d been slathered on. “Slab of light,” I whispered, moving toward the door. It sounded like the twist of fat on a marble statue’s waist; like vistas of cleanliness or gravestones in the dappled sun. I opened the door and stepped into the slab of golden light, glowing Christmas-like upon the shining stones.

  And then I felt it.

  It rose with the cool air that swirled up from the marble floor. It wasn’t fog or fainting spells or crackles in the sky. But those were its prototypes. It didn’t have the savage joy of physical harm, the happiness of appetite. It was a wave of pure feeling that belonged to no one and everyone, the way the ocean belongs to every shoreline and none at all. It was everything a grimy little small-time criminal like me could expect from a fine upstanding pillar of the community. There I was, standing in his doorway on the floor he’d laid himself, basking in the light of the lamps he’d paid for. Me, with my artistic aspirations and my eating disorder, reeking of weakness, broadcasting ruin.

  Reina always talked about her husband’s presence; how Zack could fill a room, command attention, bully and charm and outwit any adversary. In the first year that I lived there, Foxglove was a memorial to Zachary Hill, M.D., Chief of Staff at the hospital and President of several boards. His photos gathered dust on the mantle, the bar, and a good portion of the wall space. The bookshelves were full of titles that breathed the dead man’s politics and sense of humor, just as the bottles we opened released the fumes of his preferred intoxicants. I’d never even heard his voice, and I could recite dozens of stories about his cleverness, his power, his bold transgressions, and his acts of generosity. The rage that met me at the door was all those things, released from the confines of a body or a personality. And just as falling water in the ocean forces troughs into waves, all the things that Zack Hill used to be was rising into a silent crest. It was just for me, like a tiny localized expression of a continental shift.

  “Zack?” I said out loud. I felt extremely stupid. “Is that you,” I said to the presence, the way Caitlin asks a question when she knows the answer, without raising the inflection at the end. “Are you here, Zack?” I called out now. I sent my voice across the marble floor like I was standing somewhere classical and haunted, throwing down a challenge to the knights of days gone by.

  The presence—I will not call it a ghost. I do not believe in ghosts—the presence, then, suspended its fury. This was a blatant violation of the laws of physics, because a wave that has risen by the force of its own matter slamming hard against the ocean floor is required to crash back down again. It’s gravity. It’s orbital motion, the waves bouncing off of solid ground and rolling toward the land and then back out to sea again. It is a rude interruption for it to simply stop happening.

  “Do you know what, Zack,” I told it quietly. “I’m here, too.” The presence faded, like a photographic image that struggles to be seen but in the end is overexposed and fades to light.

  I became aware of the shapes of my feet, bearing into the cold stone floor through my battered shoes. My weight became a solid thing, pouring into my bones. I could feel my own enzymes coursing through me, fed by all those colors, all those stories, all those mounds of neatly manicured lavender.

  I took a long, hot bath that night. I washed my clothes and folded them carefully. Then I sat down at the walnut bar, alone, and selected a large sharp blade from the collection of Kasumi knives the surgeon had left his wife. Kasumi knives are made in Seki, a city known for the quality of its Samurai swords. I favor a seven-inch Santoku, with a deeply dropped point and a laminated wood handle. The action is decisive, the movements light.

  I arranged all the sun-ripened tomatoes Alizarin had given me on a vast wooden platter. Their skins sighed open underneath that sweet Santoku blade like they’d been waiting for this moment all their lives. They glistened where they lay, a row of little hearts, winking in the slab of light that poured onto the lawn. I was very, very hungry.

  Rockabilly Carcass

  THE MOMENTUM OF the growing season gathered toward harvest. Most people cut down their pot in stages, amputating branches only as the buds reach absolute perfection. This serves the dual purposes of turning out a high-quality product and minimizing the loss of an uninsured commodity in the event of a well-timed burglary. But sometimes, in a crop-punishing rain, a grower will cut down all the plants at the same time. Then the harvesters, embraced with sticky branches, look like the armies of MacDuff, trudging with the forest to a perilous encounter, where questions will be answered and heads might roll.

  In early fall, growers crouch over their plants as anxiously as first-time fathers monitoring the signs of impending delivery. “These hairs . . .” they’ll mutter, scrutinizing the crinkly auburn threads that look like tiny pubic hairs on the fruits of the cannabis plant. “Are these looking red to you?” they murmur somberly. “Yeah, but the crystals . . .” At this point, the discussion turns so technical, so mixed with quasi-spiritual theory, you begin to suspect that you might be witnessing the development of some new pseudo-scientific doctrine.

  There is a specific fervor that comes over people when they talk about growing pot. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs writes about pushers who don’t use heroin but get off on watching their clients shoot up. To the catalogue of complex second-hand highs, let’s add growers who don’t smoke but are high on the alchemy of growing, on the outlaw thrill of it. It takes a unique psychological metabolism to grow pot, one that runs on adrenaline but is patient as the seasons. Growers must be capable of soaking up va
st tracts of non-narrative information about soil composition and ever-changing legal statutes. It’s a cerebral, labor-intensive method of achieving a state of primal enthusiasm. Essentially, it’s a slow-motion thrill-seeker’s way to make a living.

  There are plenty of drawbacks, aside from the obvious risks of prison time, asset forfeiture, and the lack of a small claims court if your business associates behave improperly with you. At this time, you can pay an as-yet poorly regulated lab to tell you that your bud is black with mold from some disease that only affects your pot plants and a few dozen sycamore trees in New England. The Board of Equalization is ready to collect taxes from you. A set of laws that sounds like a horrible bacterial infection is on its way to decriminalizing the entire medical marijuana industry. But years of paranoia and superstition have created a culture of farmers who place their faith in macho outlaw axioms, old wives’ tales, and untested chemical compounds. In magic formulas, to put it bluntly.

  The best dispensaries are run according to complex algorithms and shrewd market research. The temperature of the political body is taken by people with PhDs in economics, polling, and statistics. But growing pot still has an elf-spotting quality to it. In the absence of meticulous records, there is a reliance on intuition and rumor that borders on faith in an unseen god. No one wants the big-city buyers to find out that sycamore mold is floating around in the local microclimate. So the one or two growers who go to the lab are viewed as a disruptive influence on the fine tradition of making up a new solution every year, based on very little scientific information and even fewer reliable resources.

  Alizarin was not an unqualified exception. But there was no room for mystic maybes in the magic practiced at Serendipity. Alizarin was unsentimental. That was what I liked about her operation. It was attractive because it defied convention in a way that felt like coming home; but also, it had an air of legitimacy to it, like something based in a well-established system of procedure and etiquette.