White Out

by Michael W Clune

  I gave Dom eighty dollars in folded tens and twenties. That’s what it took, day in and day out, just to keep that white light shining. And if it ever dimmed the devils came out. Now the white light was so dim they were sticking their little paws and claws for whole seconds inside me, like children testing the water at the beach. The day before I’d bitten down too hard on a forkful of potatoes and taken a big chip out of my front tooth. I guess I’d thought the potatoes would be harder. I didn’t used to make that kind of mistake.

  Dom took the money and Henry opened the closet door. He moved a coat from over a hole in the floor, and pulled a bundle out of the hole. Then he pulled five little white-top vials out of the bundle and tossed them to me. I got shy with desire. Ran to the bathroom. When I got out of the bathroom the dimming white light was bright again inside me and the devils were burning to death in it.

  When I got out of the bathroom Fathead was standing in the hall between Dom and Henry with a big hand over each of their shoulders.

  “Hey there Mike!” he said brightly. He moved his hand to Henry’s neck and gave it a little squeeze.

  “Ow, Fathead!” Henry honked.

  “I said hey there Mike.” I kind of stood there.

  “Hey Fathead.”

  “Why don’t we go back into the kitchen where we can all sit down? You still have chairs back there, right Dom?” He gave Dom’s neck a friendly squeeze. Dom didn’t make a sound.

  We all trooped back to the kitchen and sat down. Dom’s eyes were a little bloodshot, and his skin was even whiter than usual. Next to him, the off-white aluminum refrigerator in the corner had a healthy human glow. I hadn’t noticed it before. It looked kind of friendly. Like it wanted to tell me something.

  “Let me tell you how to get that permanent white, son,” I imagined it saying. “Just slip your head in here and have them boys shut the door real real hard on your neck.”

  “That’s a real nice refrigerator, Dom,” I said.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Dom mumbled. His big black-and-blood eyes opened on me like dogs’ mouths.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Fathead said, “you should see if you can sell that refrigerator, Dom. Maybe you could get two hundred dollars for it. Then, if you found twenty other refrigerators and sold them for two hundred each, you could pay me what you owe.”

  Fathead was a powerfully built white man about forty-five years old. The previous winter he’d been released from prison after serving eleven years. He’d made some good contacts in prison, and when he got out he started dealing. He’d bunked with Dom in prison for a couple years. Dom had gotten out first, but they stayed in touch, and Fathead began fronting him packages the past spring. Fathead had a huge habit, which he’d had since his twenties.

  He’d kept it going straight through his prison years. His pride was that he’d never once gone through withdrawal in the whole eleven years. This was a unique, almost impossible achievement. Even the street dealers from the nearby projects who had only contempt for addicts had respect for Fathead. He was also some kind of religious freak, which I think they also respected. I did too, kind of.

  Now he prepared to shoot up in front of us. Almost lazily, demonstrating that this was pure fun, that the white fire was always burning strong in him and never went out.

  “Men,” he said, emptying a large vial into a spoon, “there are two forces in this world. What are they, Dom?”

  “God and the creature,” Dom whispered through papery lips.

  “God and the creature,” Fathead repeated. He closed his eyes. “And the creature, the creature must be induced.”

  He lifted a lighter under the already blackened spoon. Then he paused. Kind of chuckled. His face took on a kind of grandfatherly softness.

  “When you’ve got a little dog, and you want him to come in for the night, and you put a little dish of water at the back door, and he comes in, what is that?”

  “Inducing the creature,” said Dom.

  “How about when you don’t want the dog pissing all over the kitchen, and he does it, and you give him a little pinch?” He put down the lighter and circled Henry’s one arm with his hand. Henry flinched, but Fathead, after letting his hand rest around Henry’s arm for a couple seconds, just picked up the lighter again.

  “Inducing the creature,” Dom whispered.

  “I had a lot of time to think when I was locked up,” Fathead continued, drawing the fluid into the syringe through a cotton ball. Microscopic white grains swam through that fluid, sometimes two of them would meet, and a second of time would spark out. I wondered what drugs did to you.

  “I had a lot of time to think and read, and I’m a lot older now. And maybe I’m not an intellectual.” I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, and when Fathead had found this out he took to calling me an intellectual.

  “And I hate intellectuals. Vanity. Listen to me.” He held the syringe before all of us. I could never have afforded a shot like that. It should have been in a museum. “Inducing the creature,” he said softly. He felt expertly along his neck till he found the pulsing vein. There was a black tattoo of a cross running down his neck and the vein pulsed along the cross. He slid in the needle and pressed down on the syringe.

  His eyes closed for maybe ten seconds. Henry shifted uncomfortably. Fathead’s blue eyes shot open.

  “The creature is induced to crawl. Induced to walk. Induced to beg. To soil itself or not to soil itself. The sin is not the inducement. That’s what those old Christians in the joint never understood.”

  Dom nodded dully. Dom could probably have burned out a century with what was moving inside him at that moment. A stolen century. Stolen from Fathead.

  “The sin is not the inducement,” Fathead continued. “That He may raise up the Lord casts down. Even unto the pit. This shit we think we’re doing here.” He laughed. “Another eye burns in our eye, another hand reaches through our hand. This,” he held up his thick, needle-scarred hand, “this is a glove.” He gazed thickly on it. “An abode for any spirit of the air. Every unrighteous and unclean spirit.”

  He must have learned to talk that way in prison. Maybe in solitary. He didn’t really seem to be addressing us. When he talked like that you kind of saw a different side of talking. As if talking wasn’t meant for talking to people.

  “And that’s what God is,” Fathead said. “When the creature is induced to crawl out of the creature. I’ve seen it myself. The whatever leaving his eyes, ‘dying.’ Crawling into the invisible world. A thousand spirits curled up in a spoon. You should see the spirit leaving a man’s face; you can feel the room get thicker. I’ve done it myself. I’ll do it again.”

  “Tuesday,” Dom said weakly.

  “Fuck Tuesday,” Fathead said. “The first time I give you something nice you fuck it up.”

  “It just got tooken, Fathead,” Henry gabbled. “It got tooken, it all got tooken, that’s all, like we said, maybe that pimp, maybe those hoes, maybe some customers.”

  Fathead’s response was obscure.

  “You’re a little, little monkey, Henry,” he said.

  Then he balled up his right hand into a fist and brought it down, hard, on Henry’s open hand. Henry only had one hand, so the effect was kind of intense. Henry yelped and stuttered but Fathead kept his fist planted on Henry’s open hand like a railroad spike.

  “And those fucking whores you’ve got staying around here, Dom? I saw their little pimp come by the other day when I was leaving. Are they like sixteen? You know what the time on a charge like that is? What, does he give you like a hundred a week to let the whores crash here? He’s scum. Driving a little Honda? Thinks he’s a pimp?” Fathead drove a new black Mercedes S500. His eyes and face were solid zombie surface. I wasn’t getting anything from him for free. I needed to get out of there. I got up.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” He’d never spoken to me like that. I thought he understood. There was a sheet stapled to the window. Fathead’s gun lay on the table next to his empty syr
inge. I thought he understood. I wasn’t serious. Well, maybe I was serious. But I wasn’t serious.

  “I gotta go teach, Fathead, it’s almost one and I gotta teach at one-thirty.” Moving slow, he half-stood up out of his seat and threw his fist into my face. I stumbled back against the wall. I didn’t feel anything but there was blood on my hands when they came away.

  “You’re high, you’ve been doing dope here, it’s my dope, I haven’t been paid for it, you’ve been stealing from me.” Fathead spoke the truth. No hand raised against him would prosper.

  “Now, if you want to leave, you can tell me where this piece of shit,” he jerked a thumb at Dom, “has stashed the dope. ’Cause I know it’s here.”

  This was a Bible situation. If I stuck by Dom’s half-assed story that the dope had been stolen I risked getting caught up in his inequity. Or I could rat Dom and Henry out right in front of them. An eye for an eye.

  “It’s in the closet in a hole in the floor under a coat,” I said. Henry started honking and gabbling. Dom stared down.

  “I wish I was dead,” he said. He didn’t say it to anyone in particular.

  “Well maybe we can see about that, Dom.” Fathead stood up. “You can go, Mike. You’re a real friend. A real creature. Here,” he tossed me a vial.

  “Wow!” I said. “Thanks a lot, Fathead! You’re awesome!”

  Henry was whimpering at the table. I don’t know what he was whimpering for. Fathead didn’t kill either of them, not that day or that week. Dom would live for another four whole months, and I heard it was just an overdose that killed him. Natural cause. And Henry would have been the first to agree that if Fathead had shot him dead on the spot, he’d be doing him a real big favor. “Wow! Thanks a lot, Fathead! You’re awesome!” You could say what you liked about Henry, but he was no idiot. He had a good head on his shoulders. He knew he needed a hole in it. He’d tell you.

  But maybe I was being callous. Maybe Henry was whimpering because the white light was starting to dim in him, and with Fathead about to take all their dope and pistol whip them both, he wouldn’t be able to score for hours, maybe not all day. Maybe he felt the squittering devils already dipping their fingers into his spine, the rats sniffing at his phantom arm. Henry told me once that when he went through withdrawal he felt it like rats chewing on his missing arm. He was probably lying. But he had every right to sniffle and whimper. No dope was a whimpering problem. A crying problem.

  Plus Henry was superstitious like Fathead. He thought nothing changed when you died. When you were dead you didn’t stop needing white tops. You just stopped being able to get them.

  But I had one, and now I had to go. Part of being a graduate student is being a teaching assistant and teaching a section of one of the big lecture courses. I couldn’t afford to miss another class. People might think I was irresponsible. I was worried. But I had a vial.

  As I drove I thought lazily about turning my car into the oncoming traffic. Bang! Lights out. I wasn’t superstitious. I thought it was all over when it was all over. Bang! I thought this about every six seconds. Bang! I didn’t even really notice it. Just background noise. Just inside talk. And I had a vial. I looked in the rearview mirror. My lip was swollen, there was blood on my teeth, and I was getting a black eye. I smiled. I had a vial. I peered at it. Maybe twelve solid hours of white time. Plus the four still left in me. It gave me confidence. Bang!

  Three minutes. I parked illegally and ran into the building, clutching my book and notes. Nancy saw me, blanched, “Mike what happened to you?” “Later,” I mouthed. I hated her. I passed Todd; he looked stunned. “Later,” I mouthed. I hated him. I had a vial. Standing outside my classroom, I took a deep breath. I hated Jason. I hated Mandy. I hated Cash. I hated Dave. I hated Eva. I hated Mom. I hated Charlie. I hated Jenny. I hated Chip. I hated Funboy. I hated Andy. I hated Steve. I hated Ashley. I hated Cat. I rubbed the vial in my pocket while I recited this little prayer. I felt better. I opened the door and went in. The room of whispering students fell silent.

  “Are you OK?” one shocked girl asked as I opened my book and arranged my notes. There was a little blood on my notes. I didn’t know the girl’s name. I didn’t know any of their names, but I got by with pointing. I looked out at the class. One kid had a smirk starting, but the rest looked anywhere from shocked to scared. Pussies. What did they have to be scared of?

  “Your teacher is a hero,” I announced. I waited for a second. “I was showing my friend from out of town—a woman—around Baltimore when a black man ran up to her and grabbed her purse. I grabbed it back and he hit me several times in the face. He also hit my friend. This made me very angry. I hit him back, he fell to the ground, then I stood with my foot on his neck until the police came. I told him if he moved I’d push my foot down.”

  The evidence of violent struggle was all over my face and my shirt. Most of them had probably never seen a black eye before. They’d all seen the impoverished black people of the city. The class of white and Asian kids smiled and clapped.

  “You are a hero,” one girl said.

  “I had my foot right on his neck,” I said. I was a great person. I was glad Fathead had punched me. I would let him punch me every day for a vial like that. Every minute. I was glad I was a hero. I was glad I hated everyone. I was glad I had a vial.

  Two in the morning. My eyes were open staring at the ceiling. Dry shocked eyes. Cat slept beside me. The hero story wouldn’t work on her. I told her I’d walked into a door. She didn’t believe it. I didn’t care. I’d gone to bed at eleven, as I did every night, and I’d do my best to sleep until eleven the next day. Cut down on awake time. Cut down on dope consumption. Cut down on expenses. Cut down on problems.

  But it was only 2:00 a.m. and I was wide awake.

  Almost every night, I would awake in terror. Covered in sweat. 2:00 a.m. The clear spot in the center of the white wheel. The eye of the rotating white storm. I saw everything clearly at 2:00 a.m. Tomorrow I’d wake up and do the tiny bit left in the vial. This would give me maybe two hours of white time in which to get eighty dollars and cop more. Yesterday I’d done the same. There had to be some mistake. The day after tomorrow I’d do the same.

  If I took any longer than two hours to score in the morning the devils would dig their claws into my spine. It would definitely take longer than two hours. This could not be right. This was my fourth relapse. Tomorrow the police might stop me again. I might overdose again. I was going to have to steal every dime Cat had. For starters.

  Sometimes, when I woke at 2:00 a.m., I’d get up and write a note to myself in big bold letters and leave it where I’d see it first thing in the morning. “No Dope!” “Don’t do it!” “Call rehab!” “My life matters!”

  But I didn’t write anything that night. Yes, I saw everything clearly. But this wasn’t the one moment of clarity that changed everything. In white time nothing happens only once. Everything that happens, happens every day, happens again and again, has always happened, will always happen.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Castle

  The phone woke me up. I turned over and lifted my head a few inches off the bed, looking around. A little pile of white dope lay on my dresser. The tiny white wheels of tricycles spun inside the white grains. One of Cat’s socks on the floor. Tick, tock. The phone rang. I was like a map of Iraq. A curious, impersonal hate knotted and unknotted itself in me. I giggled when I thought how all this might be affecting someone else. Me, you. We’re all connected. The phone rang.

  I picked up the phone. I was connected to Henry. His unreal peeled voice. I said his name and he answered me Henry style.

  “I can’t get anywhere and I can’t go anywhere,” he said. It’d been a few weeks since the Fathead episode, and I’d kind of stayed away.

  “Why the fuck—” I whispered.

  “I got to get a ride.” It sounded like he was crying. No not crying. Honking. The mournful honking of one-arm Henry. Henry was his own thing. Like birds. I imagined hundreds
of him, honking sadly.

  “I got to get a ride,” he said, practically.

  “Uh.”

  There was something wrong with the dope on my dresser. I’d copped it in Druid Hill two days before. It worked, but it made me sick. I’d been lying on my bed, alternately using and puking for two days. Lose-lose situation. Sick from the bad dope, or sick from no dope. Right now I was in between. The nausea was receding and the withdrawals were starting. I looked at the little pile of white dope on my dresser with love and hate.

  “Can you pay me?” I asked.

  “Sure, I’ll help you out, Mike, just swing on over to Dom’s and scoop me up.”

  I got up unsteadily on my loose, bloodless dope legs and went on out and over. If I could get some dope that didn’t have poison in it that would be good. And if I couldn’t I would still have the bad dope. And that would be good.

  No one was at Dom’s when I got there. I looked up at the sky. It was October. I looked uncertainly into the clear sky, my eyes widening and narrowing. Like standing too close or too far from someone’s face. There were a couple kids sitting on the curb smoking cigarettes.

  “Hey, you waiting on Dom and them?” one of the kids asked me.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  “They be back soon.” The kids smirked at each other. They were maybe fourteen. I looked down at my dirty jeans.

  “You kids like Cash Money Records?”

  “Hell yeah we like Cash Money,” one kid said.

  “I like them too,” I said.

  Cash Money was the hottest rap label that fall. Juvenile, B.G., the Hot Boys. They invented the term bling-bling. That term has been misunderstood. For the Cash Money Hot Boys, money was a way of disappearing, not a way of showing off. They sang about money that blinds. “Tell me what kinda / Nigga got diamonds that’ll bling-blind ya?”

  Cash Money sang about imaginary gun-diamonds, diamonds that shut everyone’s eyes. Imagine walking onto the street with money so strong it blinded motherfuckers. The people staggered around with burnt-out eyes and I walked free in the shining world. It was invisibility music, better than tinted windows.