The Death of Small Creatures

by Trisha Cull

  There are a variety of clouds large enough to conceal the gigantic oval-shaped ship that Dave says is lurking above the sea. You can see the effects of the hidden ship. The clouds churn spumes of white smoky stuff, a disturbance in the atmosphere, the thermal heat of spaceship engines reacting with our air. The engines blast and churn up clouds into great cauldrons of pink smoke. But no ship.

  I flinch, feel something touch my wrist, but there’s nothing there—just the faint gashes left behind from my days in the hospital, thirty or so horizontal gashes across each wrist.

  I look to the sky.

  God’s face is stretched. It is as if a great vortex from the east, a vacuum, is sucking God’s face into it. God’s mouth is gaping now, his eyes narrowed. The sun has broken through, casts its light upon the ocean making the waves silvery. My face is warm.

  My heart is pounding, my mind racing; a thousand slender aliens marching across the sky. I feel the vortex sucking me into it.

  My face is stretching, thinning into vapour.

  “There,” I say. “The ship is coming.”

  I sit at the table in Red’s fifth-wheel camper, smoking crack.

  This is the best I can feel, the best I’ve ever felt in my life.

  I want to stay here, right here in this camper, smoking crack for the rest of my life. It must never end. There must always be more crack. Red must come here to the campground every day, saddle up beside Dave’s little camper, and open his door to us.

  The pipe burns my lips, creates an instantaneous blister where the mouth purses in the middle as I suck in hard, where hot glass and my flesh touch. My lips are briefly sealed together, but I pull them apart again. It stings. I don’t realize until later when I look in a mirror that a blister has formed, sealed my lips together then broken again in one pull of the crack pipe.

  I tilt my head back and moan. “Fuck… this feels so good.”

  Red sits across from me along with Mike and another guy.

  We pass the pipe around.

  I have great lung capacity, (I was tested back in Biology 12), so when I suck into the end of the pipe, it seems to go on and on. I fill my lungs to the bursting point, hold it in, and exhale. A great white cloud blooms from my lips, fills the camper. All the guys laugh.

  “Holy, woman,” one guy says.

  I feel a little stupid about my big cloud and a little selfish, like I’m hoarding Red’s crack, freeloading, which I am. I didn’t pay for this stuff. I’m a friend of Dave’s and that seems to be enough.

  I am compelled to be here because my life has become a void, without context, without substance. Everything is strange and unfamiliar. I want to disappear inside the high or have it kill me altogether.

  “Here,” I say, sliding off my gold ring with the two little diamonds on either side of the turquoise stone, a graduation gift from an ex-boyfriend. “Does anyone want this?”

  Mike leaps for it, says, “Yeah!” I pass it over. “I’m going to give this to Carol.”

  The pipe returns to me. I take a long hit, feel I have paid into it, like now I can smoke as much crack as I want, I can smoke crack all night long and no one can stop me.

  This goes on, day after day. At night, Dave takes me to the trees near the beach and stares hard into them, into their third eyes, says he is communicating with them. He drags me around the campground parking lot at night after everyone has gone to sleep, a few campfires burning to embers here and there. We skulk under lampshades. He grabs me by the arm one time, tells me to stop, look up, look directly into the light, so I do. We look away from the light into the darkness again, our vision now containing watery orbs that drift always off the periphery of the eye. Dave says these are aliens.

  I reach my breaking point. Even I, with my drug-induced history, am beginning to feel the strangeness of it all. Even I am not this crazy.

  Three straight days of Dylan blaring on Dave’s stereo, the camper walls buzzing, my brain buzzing and clouds of crystal meth and crack swirling through the cramped quarters and pooling softly in my lungs. This isn’t fun anymore.

  It’s been two weeks.

  I look like death, have lost weight; my complexion is ghastly.

  Dave is hard at it, blasting music and transcribing away on his laptop as it goes. He believes there is secret code, messages, in Dylan’s lyrics. Every few seconds he stops the track and backs it up to listen again, so he can decipher the words more accurately. The stop and go is jarring and counterintuitive to the mind’s natural narrative leanings.

  Then he plays the music backwards too. The backwards singing comes out warped, vowels stretched, intonation ripped and realigned along some grotesque linguistic logic that almost makes sense but ultimately does not.

  Arm in arm the Lark I was brought by cow, his bride.

  Brought Ham, they honey moon.

  All-and-In, their Ram, scares me more…

  I look out the small camper window to the yellow field in the distance, reservation land, and to the dilapidated longhouse in the middle of the field. A barbed-wire fence separates me from that land. It’s early morning, and the long yellow grass glistens in dew.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I say. Dave seems not to hear me, seems unaware of my presence. He has, in fact, seemed unaware of my presence for days now.

  He says, “Wha…?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Yeah,” he says, like a declaration, as if affirming that I am in fact leaving, as if he thought of it first.

  “I’m going this morning.”

  He looks up at me now. “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes,” I say. “In an hour, no, half an hour… any minute now.”

  “When?”

  “Right away.”

  “Don’t go,” he says.

  I get up and swing open the camper door. A cool breeze wafts inside, and morning light and the taste of salt. I stand in the doorway, swing myself out, holding onto the door frame with one hand. I inhale deeply. “Oh my god,” I say. “It’s beautiful out here.” My fogginess lifts. My face feels freshened, my mind cleared. In this moment I remember I am not this person, I am not supposed to be here, and believe for a moment there must be some other life waiting for me back in the city.

  Dave stands up, closes the laptop and stretches. The camper becomes quieter, less electrified with the buzz of the laptop suddenly muted. He walks up behind me, pulls me in close to him, kisses the back of my neck.

  I pack my stuff in my duffle bag and in another backpack, mount them on the back of the bike that Dave stole a couple of days ago, try to balance the weight. I will be wearing a second backpack. The bike has one of those platforms jutting out above the back tire. I rig my stuff onto the bike using this platform, packing my bags into place but wary of the spokes and pedals. By the time I’m finished, it is a gigantic impossible mound, yet it is the only way. It’s two kilometres to the highway and the closest bus stop. I could never haul my stuff on foot that far. It’s about ten kilometres to town biking along the back roads.

  “I have to make this work,” I say, and Dave laughs. Everything is a joke to him. I can’t relate. All of this, this pending bike ride, the past two weeks, the month in the hospital, the past ten years, will be or have been the hardest part of my life. I am pained to the core, carry with me shame and regret, can’t imagine how I will ever fight my way back again. And yet there is no other way to go than forward. There is no other way out of here, out of all of this, this day, this moment.

  “Here,” he says, tightening it for me. He finds a bungee cord in the camper, comes back wielding it triumphantly, then ties the mound down harder and tighter.

  We stand back and gaze upon the bike. I think, I’ll never make it.

  Dave is going to ride in with me.

  It’s a gorgeous June day. We take the back road past old farmhouses, fields and b
erry orchards. Pedalling up even the slightest incline is difficult. It takes me a while to get my bearings, to find my centre of balance, my core. Everything is askew, my coordination, my gravity. I am perched up higher on the bike than I would like, so on top of everything else I feel like I’m leaning up and over the handlebars. The seat is too high, so my legs stretch all the way out when I pedal. The whole arrangement is absurd.

  This is a treacherous and soul-sucking trek, though the scenery is gorgeous, fragrant and lush. We wind along dizzily under trees thick with leaves. Sometimes the trees form a canopy over the path and we slip through cooler shadows and shade. Leaves flicker in sunshine. I smell hay, fresh-cut grass, flowers, lilacs at one point and faintly, from the highway, from that distant murmur of traffic half a kilometre away up on the high road, comes the scent of oil and gas.

  We come to a little roadside farm. Lying in the mud, right up close to the path, is an enormous pig. I had no idea pigs could become so big. At first I don’t see her. She is so inert, so still, and she blots out so much of the landscape I don’t at first distinguish her from the mud. There are sunflowers here in this yard too, and chickens and goats and a couple of cats. The farmhouse is small, run down. It seems to sink into itself like it’s melting, like it’s going back into its basic elements of wood and stone, returning to the earth from whence it came. Surely, no one is home.

  The air is still and warm. No movement in the trees. No car sounds. A sprinkler turns out in the farmer’s field, that soft ch, ch, ch. I get off the bike and go over to the pig, lean over and lay my cheek upon her warm pink belly. The pig lifts her head lazily, flinches, flaps an ear, then lays her head down again.

  Dave says, “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, Trish.”

  I pat the pig, stroke it. She doesn’t stir. She is spent with something: too much life, perhaps, or not enough. I have such emotion for this animal I almost cry.

  “I love you, pig,” I say. “I’m sorry you have to die.”

  Grass smells warm and sweet all around me. I am suddenly hungry for fresh strawberries, nectarines, oranges, juicy succulent fruit to be squelched upon, sucked in, marvelled over. I think of my grandmother’s plastic red and white checkered tablecloth on the porch outside, under her awning, the warm summer evenings we spent playing rummy, drinking concoctions of grenadine and lime cordial as the sun set behind the mountains, and the dog, Tina, asleep under my bare feet, her warm fur, the gentle rise and fall of her chest.

  I get up but don’t bother to dust myself off. There’s dirt on my T-shirt and blades of grass, tiny fine pig hairs even, but I don’t care. I want these traces of the garden upon me, feel christened by them. What I need now is earth, mud, grass and sky—I need sky. And a warm yellow sun. I need to bite down into a succulent orange then drink sweet grenadine. My body is so corrupted from the past two weeks, and from years of self-abuse before that.

  I want God to take me in his arms and love me, and the pig, to love us both, to love us both into salvation and grace.

  Dear God, please love me, I think. Dear God, please let this pig live.

  We enter Victoria through View Royal, back into civilization, past beautiful houses and tree-lined streets. I am desperately thirsty but we have no water left.

  It’s downhill for a while. This part of the trek I like. I feel like I’m just out for a cruise on my bike, pretend this is my neighbourhood, that I live in one of the great estates set back from the road.

  “How much farther?” I say.

  Dave is biking circles around me, can’t seem to pedal fast enough. He’s still high on meth. I probably am too. I’ve let him ride way ahead of me while I stayed back, leisurely meandering along under the sun and heart-stopping blue sky, consumed by a new sense of my body, my muscles, my most rigorous self. Sweat pours down my face. I am sweating the poison out of me.

  This feels like penance.

  “Not far now,” Dave hollers, though I only have a faint idea of where we’re going, through the city, downtown, over to Megan’s, something like that. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Something has overcome me, something like grace. I feel compelled into a path of least resistance. There’s nothing left to do now but let go.

  Megan has gotten wind of the fact that I’ve been doing crack and crystal meth, so she tells me I can’t stay at her place anymore. So just like that, at 2 pm in the middle of a non-descript day in the middle of June, I have nowhere to stay. The last thing I want to do is to impose upon my sister, again, but I don’t know what else to do. So I call her, and she comes and rescues me, again.

  I stay with her until we both move into her new house in early July.

  I begin to walk again, baby steps up the driveway then to the street and beyond. I go for long walks, let the poison flood from my body, let the cool ocean air cleanse my pores. I drink lots of water and tea, spend hours at the coffee shop reading or writing, coming back into myself.

  Miraculously, I start running again.

  I think about my rabbits. I’m going to get well for them. I take Caravaggio to the vet to get his teeth trimmed. The details of my existence begin to materialize again: first, the clothes on my back; the shoes on my feet; the wind against my face; the sun in my eyes; my face in a mirror. I stare at myself and see myself. There you are, I think, noting the pale skin and blue eyes, the dry blonde hair, the high cheekbones and full lips. My visage comes back to me. Like a deer looking into a still pond, I am vaguely aware of my existence. Peacefulness presides over me.

  I go for long runs along the ocean, up Dallas Road, around Clover Point, all the way along Ross Bay and back again. My muscles grow strong. I become leaner and firmer, feel the endorphins instead of drugs coursing through my veins.

  I am seeing Dr. P weekly, for an hour each visit. He offers me so much of his time and attention. I’m grateful.

  “I just spent two weeks doing crack and crystal meth,” I say.

  “Well for god’s sake,” Dr. P says. “No wonder you’re feeling agitated.” Then adds, “It takes days for the drugs to completely leave your system. Cocaine, seventy-two hours. Amphetamine, forty-eight hours. Cannabis, thirty days. Crystal meth, seventy-two hours. Crystal meth, micro-aneurysms of the brain. Crack, cravings. Cannabis, mimics the effects of schizophrenia on the brain.” He appears irritated, disappointed. I feel like a loser.

  I gaze upon him as he sits across from me in his office chair.

  I am so in love with this man.

  His two top shirt buttons are undone, revealing a little bit of chest hair. I want to kiss him there, press my mouth upon his chest.

  There is a big rectangular window on the back wall with ugly blinds pushed off to each side. The window looks out onto a side street where the loading bays are. A few trees in the foreground. July light sparkles upon the rustling leaves.

  I look out this window frequently during appointments, averting my gaze from Dr. P’s, can’t hold eye contact for long, am still so shy and embarrassed to be in therapy. I look out the window and at the filing cabinets to the left of the window, at the children’s drawings and paintings covering the filing cabinets, taped on. I find this so endearing, that he took the time to display the drawings that children have made for him, just another reason to love him.

  “I’ll never do drugs again,” I say half-heartedly.

  “What compelled you to do something so dangerous?” he asks.

  “I wasn’t myself,” I say. I walked out of the hospital loaded with plastic bags and luggage, with remnants of myself, of my old life. My home was gone. Husband, gone. Job, gone. Money, gone. Debt, huge. “I was lost,” I say.

  Clinical Note:

  Staying in a suite in sister’s house. Met David on 4A. Had a brief relationship with him. She did crack and crystal meth with him. “I really loved crack. I had to get out of there.” She thinks she has Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder II. Sh
e is depressed. Chronic sleep disturbance. I advised her to discuss referral to sleep lab and see her GP.

  I am living in the basement suite of my sister’s new house located in a shifty area of the city. The house is beautiful, but the city’s most prominent drug house is six doors down. We are on the ambulance route to the hospital, so the sirens blare all through the day and night.

  I’m high on NeoCitran, again, fifteen packets in. My resurgence in early July has given way to bad habits. I haven’t done Neo since before being admitted to the hospital, but that numbing sensation has lured me back inside its dextromethorphan haze.

  The July sun is setting pink, golden, beyond the rooftops of houses across the street. The green shingles on my sister’s house are illuminated in an orange slant of light as the sun drops out of view. Orange light bends into my new living room, across the green carpet. In the living room is a yellow floral-print love seat, a little wood coffee table, an old tube-style TV, a small wood desk with a black leather seat in front of it, and a tall white halogen lamp.

  The hallway is white linoleum and leads to a washer and dryer, above which is a shelf where I have arranged my dishes. I have only a couple of water glasses, small plates, popcorn bowls, one pot, one fying pan and a microwave. I have a toaster oven and a hotplate that sit on top of the washing machine. There is no counter or kitchen sink. I do my dishes in the bathtub.

  I get high, write my blog, check my email obsessively hoping for some small interaction with the outside world. I feel numb and hopeless at the same time, long to feel the skin split to obliterate the numbness if only for a few seconds, search for something to ease the anxiety and depression.