A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  He rolled his eyes at Mike. All of us, including Alizarin, heard the telepathic message about women and their whims. But Mike was rigid with fear, like a gentle wild creature suffering capture myopathy.

  “You use gas to ignite an engine,” Morpheus went on calmly, as if he had just discovered the principles of combustion and that was how they’d scare away the leprechauns.

  What struck me most about the fury that followed was how unsurprised Alizarin seemed in her rage. She had been exactly this upset about the Tupperware. She’d come close when Morpheus had insisted, in an idle hour, that eggs are dairy products. No one has ever read the definition of dairy products from a 1986 edition of the OED with the passionate vindication of Alizarin Goldfarb at the end of that hour.

  It was hard to imagine how the two of them had carved out a life together. They were always gathering momentum for their mutual destruction, always barely missing it for reasons that seemed to defy all natural laws. Their marriage was like a high-speed car chase in a movie, where no one ever gets hurt in a dumpy little sedan that corners like a race car after leaping over fruit stands.

  But a car chase, highly staged or not, requires unrelenting concentration. Morpheus and Alizarin focused on the fight and kept each other close—closer than enemies, closer than friends; closer than lovers who cannot stand the sight of one another. I got the distinct impression that it would have been perfectly acceptable to them—not ideal, but acceptable—if the house burned down while they were concentrating on whose turn it was to clean the cat box.

  And yet, the savagery at Serendipity did not preclude a sound artistic sensibility. One day during harvest, as we waited for the rest of the crew to arrive, Alizarin suggested I go outside and draw the bluebelly lizards. My drawing was stiff, she explained. The lizards would bring a sense of motion to my gesture as they skittered and flickered, ogling with golden eyes. “Plus, it’s getting cold, so they’re not moving that fast,” she added, effectively strapping a set of training wheels onto my stub of graphite.

  Lizards are pure motion, as simple as a song that is all melody. I approached the first one with an unearned level of confidence, noting with a higher hominid’s contempt how little expression it had on its face. It retaliated by presenting two foreshortened limbs and flicking its tail out of sight, forcing me to render its quizzical saurian smirk. As if it were deeply invested in asserting its natural superiority, the creature suddenly performed about a dozen pushups in less time than it took to render it wrong, flicked its tapered tail again, and vanished.

  I began to scribble in the margins of my notebook, hoping the crew would show up soon and save me from the mockery of tiny reptiles. I noticed Morpheus, running up and down the driveway with a small silver tarp in his upraised arms, like a purposeful madman in the background of an Ingmar Bergman film. Finally he gave up and stood in the shade of the house, panting and sweating and looking perplexed. He smelled like cardamom, I thought, like something green with seeds inside.

  “I thought I’d lost that tarp,” he reported. “But then I took all that gingko, and suddenly I remembered where I’d put it. I was celebrating just now, trying to make sure the gingko was circulating through my whole system.” He glanced at my sketchbook. “Are you writing or drawing?”

  “A little of both. Neither.” I angled the book so he could see all my little reptilian abortions.

  “Sweeter, more savage, than hope?” he read. “Is that the title?”

  “I think it’s the last line,” I told him. “I’m writing a poem, I guess, about the lizards.”

  “Care to read out lout?” He smiled a friendly, unambiguous smile.

  “Sure.” At this, he turned his back and gazed out over the valley, where the only movement visible was the shimmering of heat waves.

  It was a strange instinctive sensitivity, I thought, to take his face away as I read. I saw his hand half-curled at dog’s-head height. About midway through the poem, Alizarin’s big mutt Effie crept up quietly and placed his ears beneath that hand. By the end, the dog was pressing a ribby flank against the sparsely furred leg of the man. The two of them stared off in opposite directions, like they’d been thrown together in a crowded streetcar and the only polite thing to do was pretend it wasn’t happening.

  I rustled the page to let them know I was done.

  “Ahl riiiight!” Morpheus exclaimed huskily, like a musician after a successful lick. I tried to look like I was thinking critically. “Do you have any more?” I did not. “Well, hey. Make a copy of that, and I’ll try to set it to music. It’s so weird and . . . spiritual, in kind of a sinister way.”

  I began to think rather highly of my poem.

  He mused for a moment. “In a lot of places, people pay tribute to their demons. Or the darker side of life, if you want to be finicky about it. Not in a fetishistic way, like so-called Satanists here in the West. Who really don’t know a damned thing about demonology. So to speak.”

  I could tell that if he ever watched a movie made from a book he loved, he would be tormented by all the ways the movie got it wrong.

  “You love your demons like you love your children. You don’t withhold your love from a child just because he’s a demon.” He was joking, but in the way that mystics do, when they believe the truth is contained in a great cosmic laugh.

  “When I was in Bali,” he went on, clearly about to illustrate the truth of what he’d just said, “I went into this tiny out of the way shrine. It was one of those little ramshackle places, more or less devoted to some local deity.” He paid my worldliness the compliment of imagining I had a category for Southeast Asian shrines, full of gods I’d never heard of. “But really, they had a whole crew of deities, mostly different versions of The One. Beautiful women, all looking like Tara, and androgynous Buddhas and vicious little fat dudes with fantastic animal heads and claws and really horrible antisocial propensities. Like maybe they would tear your entrails out if you didn’t invite them to your party or include them in your sacrifice or something.” He paused to savor the possibilities. “And they were all decorated with fresh flowers. There was some gorgeous sexy pink flower blooming all over the place, and every one of these guys—and the Taras, too, especially the Taras—had flowers all over them. Imagine! This fierce little nasty baby-snatching demon with a delicate pink flower behind his ear. You wouldn’t tell a kid he couldn’t have something nice if all the other kids had it. Even if he was a demon.”

  “Don’t they say Jesus is supposed to love you no matter what you do?” I remarked, unable to ignore the opportunity to play devil’s advocate to his love-drenched demonology.

  He winced, like Rudolf Lindt peering into a child’s Easter basket. “That’s so watered down. The only Christians with a real juicy sense of mystery about the whole thing were the Catholics. Before they pussed out, that is. I mean, come on. The cannibalism. The black-clad virgins. The shameless conspicuous consumption. Have you ever been to the Vatican? Can you imagine how many peasants starved to death to build that thing? It’s the world’s tackiest monument to human weakness. Those people knew all about blood sacrifice. It’s what all the old gods went for. They weren’t enlightened. They didn’t give a shit about us. They were greedy and horny and jealous. With superpowers. But at least they were honest. They weren’t paying lip service to some barefoot poverty-stricken rabbi and his sainted Jewish mother with her premarital celestial fucking around and that smug little smirk and her downcast eyes. Those people wouldn’t even be a footnote in the history of the real gods. They would be beggars. No one would even try to pretend they gave a shit about them. With their one god.” He made a furious sound, as if to say, had he been a god-fearing pagan in Constantine’s time, he would have offered some irrefutable proofs and maybe changed the course of history. “Goddamned Christians,” he muttered. Gathering his crumpled tarp, he stalked off down the driveway.

  Chocolate-Covered Orange Peels

  Betrayal

  MORPHEUS AND REINA obviously didn’t c
are that they were acting like villains invented by medieval Christians. Morpheus appeared to be on the verge of conjuring a demon any second now. And Reina was a patriarch straight out of the Old Testament, with her towering rage and her vows about love and revenge.

  “You are not going to believe this,” she greeted me when I came home from a hard day’s work on the pot farm. What part would I play in the movie of Reina’s life? I wondered. I wasn’t quite a friend. And I wasn’t necessary enough to be a sidekick. I would be the hairdresser, with sympathy half a shade warmer than neutral and questions written in to get the exposition moving.

  “What happened?” I asked obligingly, to move things along.

  “Look at this.” She had her laptop on the bar, like she was about to put on a slideshow of Zack Hill’s indiscretions.

  I moved closer. I had a sticky patina of pot resin on my hands. I could practically see the waves of fragrance rolling off of me. But I am absolutely sure that at that moment, I could have strolled across the marble floor completely naked with garlands of buds in my hair, and Reina would have beckoned me over to look at her laptop. When I think of how many crop circle hoaxes I could have perpetrated but didn’t, I could cry my eyes out.

  We were looking at Monya Harmann’s Facebook page. I had gathered most of what I knew about Reina’s daughter from photographs. I knew she was beautiful, dark-eyed, and slim, with long black hair like an Indian maiden in one of those offensive old Westerns. I knew her father, Matthew Harmann, had given her a Bible with a picture of himself marking the Book of Matthew. I knew she’d had braces on her teeth and that her mother thought she should stand up straight.

  “Look at that!” Reina jabbed a finger at the collage of photographs and hastily composed remarks. The top knuckle of the finger looked a little swollen. The tip was slightly bent. “She’s talking about the baby on her Facebook page!” Monya Harmann had 546 friends on Facebook. “It’s all over the Internet! My friend Amy called me and said, is this true? Why didn’t she tell me? I said, Monnie, it is unacceptable for you to treat our friends this way. Our oldest friends are wondering why you didn’t tell them personally. I didn’t teach her to be this disrespectful. Everyone’s talking about the baby. And Amy and Max feel left out. They’ve known her all her life, and she couldn’t even give them a call and say, hey, I’m pregnant. By some guy twelve years older than I am who hasn’t even said one word about marriage . . .” She scrolled through the comments. Monya’s friends were ethnically diverse and exquisitely groomed.

  “Do you know what this is about?” she said suddenly.

  I was just standing there. I have spent weeks of my life standing around passively, waiting for openings in conversations so I can slip away.

  “This is about me not being ready to be a grandmother,” she announced, as if the material had submitted itself to her analysis without the least resistance. “And she doesn’t even realize that. She thinks it’s all about her. So selfish! I don’t believe this . . .”

  I wandered into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. I should never, under any circumstances, drink coffee after three p.m.

  “What happened to the coffeepot?” I asked. The counters were bare. I had a brief image of Reina in a rage, sweeping everything onto the ground with both arms. But she was tapping keys on her laptop, on the verge of cracking the case.

  “Gregory’s spending the night,” she said shortly, compressing her lips as she came across another offensively unscandalized comment from a girl with beautiful hair. “‘Oh, Monnie,’” she read in a high, mincing voice, as if she’d never seen a more vapid remark. “‘I can’t wait to be an auntie. Luv, Serena’. I know Serena. Whose side is she on, anyway? He came up a few days ago, while you were gone,” she elaborated.

  I realized we were having one of those conversations where topics are addressed in a series of partly overlapping circles. Sometimes I wish I could just make diagrams while people are talking to me.

  “He brought Akana, of course. He said she would never speak to him again if he left her. She climbed up on the counter and went through the cupboards. She threw a bunch of cocoa and chocolate-covered orange peels—the expensive ones, from Christmas—onto the floor and left the water running. I guess she was mad because nobody left a giant hunk of perfectly prepared meat lying around for her to gnaw on.”

  “Left the water running,” I repeated stupidly.

  “She bumped the faucet,” Reina told me carelessly, as if this were not infinitely more interesting than partisan warfare over an unsanctioned pregnancy. I tried not to think about what it would take to drive an elegant wild animal to behave like a temperamental old maid with severe menopause symptoms.

  GREGORY BROUGHT STEAKS. Akana scrupulously ignored them, surveying all of us with a wide-eyed imitation of innocence. She was basically a sociopath. Reina had spent the entire afternoon foraging around in Monya’ social media, and now she was strangely elated. She didn’t even bristle when Akana pressed her lissome fur-clad body against Gregory’s legs and narrowed her eyes at the lady of the house.

  Instead, she gave her furry rival an unprecedented friendly caress, while planting a kiss on her gentleman caller’s ever-expanding bald spot. She presented him with a frosty beer in her non-wolf fondling hand.

  “He’s done it!” she announced, as if she had nominated someone for a special honor and he had distinguished himself.

  Gregory held his beer uncertainly, like he thought she might be proposing a toast. Akana lowered her muzzle and rolled her eyes. She seemed to be conveying that she simply could not believe it had taken this poor daft human female so long to figure it out.

  “Jeremy!” Reina cried. “Jay-Jay!” The tableau remained unchanged. “Monnie’s baby-daddy,” she relented at last.

  “He cheated,” I guessed. I felt like I’d heedlessly sat in the front row at one of those shows where performers heighten the tension by dragging audience members into the act.

  “Yyyyyesss!” Reina made a fist and barely refrained from pumping it in the air. “He didn’t even try to hide it! Monya is crushed.” She sounded like a citizen journalist reporting on the ouster of a cruel regime.

  “Did you talk to her?” Gregory still looked puzzled. Akana was disdainful. Her people had ways of dealing with these things. “Did she say she was crushed?”

  “I don’t need to talk to her.” Reina dropped her fist. “I know her.” She looked like he had just asked her if she was sad when her grandmother died.

  “So she didn’t say she was crushed,” Gregory determined, holding his beer a little more confidently now. He sounded very scientific, probing a hypothesis.

  “She didn’t have to.” Reina was still astonished. “He is her boyfriend. He is the father of her unborn child. And now he’s running around with this little junior-league hussy . . .” She had gone very still, though the impression she gave was not one of serenity. “I found a picture of her. They’re friends on Facebook. Friends. She’s just a skinny little blonde thing, nothing to her. Nothing at all. Just a scrawny, ugly, little . . . thing. With blonde hair. I bet you anything it’s fake,” she added savagely. Her own loyalties were starting to blur. “She even went to her page and said, ‘oh, Monnie, I’m so happy for you, blah, blah,’ and then she just struts off with her boyfriend. Doesn’t even try to hide it.” She had presented her evidence, and it was irrefutable.

  Gregory took a careful swallow of his frosty microbrew. “Maybe monogamy is not their arrangement,” he articulated with perfect clarity, looking steadily at Reina. I swear Akana smirked.

  “You know what?” Reina replied. Her voice was several degrees frostier than that beer. “It’s been a long time since I had a good run,” she concluded in a tone that suggested it had been a while since she’d had a truly gratifying shooting spree.

  Reina was a marathon runner. She had double D fake breasts and a lifelong intermittent smoking habit that cropped up in times of stress, the way it always will if you thought cigarettes were really co
ol when you were thirteen years old. “I used to train twenty hours a week,” she reminisced one time. She sounded husky and nostalgic and a little mad, like she did when she told me that she used to be like Danica, laying down her life for the cause.

  “That’s a part-time job,” I remarked.

  “Yeah. Well. Zack Hill was a full-time job. And I already had a full-time job. So.” She shrugged. “Zack liked to live well. We went out. We drank a lot of good wines.” She looked affectionately into the bottom of her glass, the way you might look at a beloved child who has disappointed you. Maybe by being a demon.

  Reina still drank a lot of good wines. But every now and then, like a bad habit she’d picked up in her youth, she’d throw on her running gear and hit the trails behind the house. Hard. “I have my own theories about fitness,” she declared; and because she was one of those people who can leap up off the couch and win a marathon—though probably not a prestigious one—while chain-smoking and refreshing herself with a few good wines, no one ever challenged her. Least of all to a footrace.

  She was forty-eight years old now. Age is just a number, they say; but whoever they are, they seem to forget that we live in a world ruled by mathematical algorithms. When Reina came back from her run, she was limping and clenching her teeth, like a horse that will die trying to conceal an injury. Akana was civilized enough not to demonstrate a Pavlovian response to that.

  “I think I need the laser, Baby,” Reina said in a voice that was soggy with pain. It would be weeks before she healed enough to hurt herself that badly again.

  Without a word, as if this were their established method of abolishing the differences between them, Gregory produced two pairs of enormous old-man sunglasses. They looked exactly like the ones my grandfather used to settle over his bifocals when he thought he might be about to encounter a little sunlight. With professional tenderness, he gave his lady-love his arm and led her to an overstuffed couch. She reclined with languid primness, like a Victorian lady about to receive a treatment for female hysteria. With a stern expression on the part of his face that was visible beneath the shades, Gregory took up a small wand and massaged the air about an inch above the injured knee. They looked like they had found their bliss in some elaborate intergalactic role-playing charade. Feeling more like a voyeur than ever, I absconded. I had a few small yellow volumes to read.