White Out

by Michael W Clune

  “Everyone’s connected to everyone,” Funboy replied.

  “Come on,” Sara said. “Be serious. Mike’s scared.”

  “I’m not scared!”

  “Look,” Funboy stifled a yawn. “Who knows what Tony’s got going? Stay out of it. It’s between him and Howard. And maybe Red too. Just forget about it.”

  “Well, I’m never going back there,” I said. “Safety is rule number one with me, Funboy. Remember that.” From now on, it was strictly drive-through dope shopping. After two weeks, I was beginning to realize I could no longer blindly go wherever Funboy led.

  “Hey, don’t order me around,” he said. “You’re lucky I cop for you. Most people I cop for give me four or five vials. You only give me one and sometimes none. You don’t have any fucking money, so quit acting like I work for you.”

  He paused. “We’re friends.”

  He was right. I didn’t have any money. The first time he’d taken me to cop I’d given him sixty dollars, the second time twenty, and then I was broke. We had nothing in common. Did just not giving him money make us friends?

  “We are friends,” I said.

  “That’s precious,” Sara said. I looked at her. The passing streetlights fell on her bare arms. I felt the square of dope in my shirt pocket. Right then I had a lot of needs, but also a lot of ways. I confess plainly that events have controlled me. I wasn’t 100 percent sober, either.

  We pulled up to my apartment building. Right across Charles Street from the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins. Apartment 606. “It’s kind of bare,” Sara said. She had a tattoo on her lower back and she’d been in a porno, but I could tell the rubies in her earrings were real. Funboy said she only dated rich guys. I’d made an effort to act superior, but my car was a cold fact, and my cheap bare apartment was another. I was a little worried that she’d bail when she realized I was just a broke grad student. She didn’t.

  I was feeling kind of excited. I took out the white paper square of dope and looked at it. It was a white tunnel. At the far end of the white tunnel, I saw the white cloud from the afternoon on Chip’s roof. The cloud spooled out into the room. There were a couple lit candles. Funboy passed out on the couch. Sara and I crouched under a candle. I spread open a book on the eighteenth-century painter Fragonard and showed it to her.

  I was obsessed with the French master. The luxury of ancient Europe. I’d been dying to tell Sara about him. It would impress her. It would bring us closer. Something Howard said had reminded me. The book was open to a full-page color image of The Swing.

  “Is this what you study in grad school?” she asked.

  “No. I just like it.” The pink dress of the girl on the swing spread out like a rose. Her shoe flew off, revealing her naked foot. Her lover crouched below her on the grass, his thin arm pointing at the center of her spread dress. Behind her stood another man, pulling the ropes that moved the swing. Sara’s lazy finger swirled down the girl’s rose spirals.

  “Look at their faces.” Fragonard’s round, open-mouthed porno faces. Pasted on the bodies like a fish’s fake eyes. Fake openings. Fake shock. Blood and feeling ran smoothly under those faces, finding their real openings below. Their real faces: the girl’s rose center, the man’s jutting arm, the servant’s tense rope-hand. Sara’s shocked mouth O’d open. The servant’s hand pulled down on the rope hard. The girl’s naked feet turned in opposite directions.

  Sara’s naked foot rose from the floor, pointed up at Funboy’s open mouth. His closed eyes. His sleeping arm hung over the couch, pointed into Sara’s center. My tense hand pulled down on the rope hard. The girl’s head went back on the swing. Behind her stood another man.

  “Can you look at me when you do that?” White tears ran up her rose face. My body turned white in her fake shocked eyes. Sara reached over my chest to pick up her earrings, carefully placed inside her tiny shoe. She turned her head and fastened them. Funboy made snoring noises like a dog snuffling sugar.

  “Those rubies are beautiful,” I said. She gave me a funny look.

  “They’re totally fake.”

  I looked at them more closely. She was right. They weren’t even red. They didn’t even have any facets. They were pink plastic dots.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sorrow

  When I woke up, Sara was gone. A brief note and a twenty-dollar bill for her share of the drugs. One o’clock. It was a Sunday in September. I stretched and yawned. The yawn went on, my eyes were a little watery, but otherwise no symptoms. I’d done dope two days in a row, not three. I walked into the apartment’s other room.

  Funboy was snoring and snuffling, his arm hung over the couch. Probably hasn’t slept for days, I thought. He looked awfully thin, stretched out in the daylight. I’d have to remember to get him to eat something. It was a little chilly in the apartment. It could still get pretty warm during the day, but the humidity was gone. The air was getting thinner. The day’s heat hung in it like oil in water. Before something disappears, it separates from the things around it. I opened the blinds. The sun’s heat pulsed in the cool room.

  I gently pressed Funboy’s shoulder. He turned and coughed, and sat up. He was only twenty. “Whoa,” he said. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. He was shivering. He reached under the couch’s cushion, took out a wadded-up sock, unrolled it, took out the half-empty vial, and started looking for his works.

  I never met anyone who said they liked Funboy, and it seemed like most people in Baltimore knew him. I was alone with Tony for exactly two minutes the day before. Funboy had gone to the bathroom. “Dude’s a lame,” Tony said. Even Funboy’s mother, who I would meet in Canton later that year, didn’t like him. “Let me ask you something, Mike. Why the hell do you hang out with Scott?” My friends from New York, who I introduced to him when they visited, didn’t like him. Chip asked frankly if he was retarded. Funboy would rip me off six or seven times, but it was never for that much. I kind of felt like I deserved it. I ran into him twice after I got clean too. I think I was the only one who liked him.

  He’d had his leg broken. There were knife scars on his side and his arm. His nose had been broken. He’d been to juvie and then to jail. He’d been an addict since he was fifteen. I started doing dope when I was twenty-one. In the middle of getting high, in the middle of the night, I often felt as if I’d forgotten something important. Funboy didn’t. His arms looked terribly thin in the sunlight. His eyes were empty. There’s nothing to be done about that. Compassion does not restore a human form to those who have lost it. Everything living dies, everything changes.

  And things aren’t as bad off on their own as I used to think. It’s insane the way some people try to turn their memory into a hospital for every sick thing they’ve ever seen. I know better. I’m not a safe place even for something as desperate as Funboy’s thin right arm, with the small knife scar, the smaller burn mark, and all the tiny track marks. But if he’s still alive somewhere, and needs some help…

  “Howard’s dope is pretty tight,” he said. “He gets it from the same place as Red.” He wiped his nose and looked around with slow eyes. In some ways Funboy was like a blind person. His eyes always pointed in a different direction than his body. He stood up and walked toward the door, eyeing the couch. He was humming the tune to “I Like It Raw.” The tune only had two or three notes. The tune wasn’t the point of that fucking song.

  “Shut up, Funboy!”

  “Damn, Mike, what are you so pissy about?” I guess I’m just sad.

  When we got outside, Funboy looked lovingly at my dirty Grand Am before getting in.

  “I love this car, Mike. It’s the only place I feel safe sometimes.” I nodded, not knowing what to say. I guess I loved it too. Two years later, I would take fifty or sixty pictures of that car with Cat’s camera over the course of an autumn. I found a pile of them when I was cleaning out my apartment after I got clean. No people in the pictures, just the car. Under sunlight, in the rain, parked under trees or streetlights.

  “Where do yo
u want to go, Funboy?” He fiddled with a lighter and looked out the window. The blue September Baltimore light isn’t good for you. Funboy throbbed in it. He didn’t know shit.

  “I want to go with you,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  Well, he definitely wasn’t joking, if by “joking” you mean sarcastic or ironic or humorous. Funboy didn’t get into that. But a lot of the things he said didn’t mean anything. I looked at him. You couldn’t tell anything by looking at him. I dropped him off in Fells Point, then headed straight to the airport.

  My stepmother’s sister had died, and I’d agreed to come back for the funeral. I didn’t really know her well, but she’d always been nice to me, and I could tell her niceness wasn’t a front or a fake. It was sincere. It went all the way through her, like the taste of oranges goes all the way through an orange. Even the peel.

  Barb (that was her name) had been hit and killed by a drunk driver. Barb and Lori, my stepmom, had been closer than any two people I’d ever seen. War prisoners get close like that. For them it was childhood. On the plane I felt restless. I kind of thought about ordering a drink. It was before noon. My sister picked me up from the airport.

  “Kind of fucked up, huh?” she said.

  “Yes, well, it’s good to get out of Baltimore for a little bit. Perspective. There’s a lot of interesting people in Baltimore. My friend Funboy, for instance. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to come and visit me any time soon.”

  Jenny shot me a strange look. “I meant about Barb, idiot.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, these things happen. One day you’re here, the next day you’re gone. Gone but not forgotten. Can I borrow twenty dollars? I can write you a check.”

  I looked out the window. “I’m probably the best graduate student in the university. I might not be the smartest, but I’m the fastest.” I moved my finger rapidly around in the air. “The thoughts go through my head so fast. Some of my fellow students, the ones that went to Harvard and Yale for undergrad and were Rhodes Scholars and all, they’re not so stupid. They’re pretty smart. They probably have more actual thoughts than I do. But my thoughts move so fast. One of my fast thoughts gets to all the same places as twenty or thirty of their slow thoughts, and it gets there faster. You can ask me something if you want.”

  She didn’t feel like asking me something right then. OK, maybe later. I felt it was very important to be able to communicate with people. We pulled up at my stepmother’s parents’ white house in their deep-fifties Wonder Bread suburb. We went in the front door and Jenny offered appropriate condolences while I nodded. Lori’s father gave me a beer. He asked me how grad school was. Lots of people milled around looking dazed. My own father came up, hugged me, and told me how much it meant to him and Lori that I was able to make it.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said. It occurred to me then that I had made a decision to be there. I remember thinking that was strange. In those days, things just seemed to happen by themselves.

  I sat down in an open chair around the kitchen table. One of Lori’s uncles was telling a story. He was a grizzled white-headed guy. I’d met him when my dad and Lori had gotten married. He’d been a captain in the Navy during World War II.

  “The one thing I could never stand on my ship was a homosexual,” he was saying in his firm, matter-of-fact way. “Nowadays it’s ‘cool’ to be homosexual. All the high school boys think it’s cool to act like they are homosexuals. They think it’s neat to dress and walk like they are homosexuals. Well, I assure you things were very different in 1942. It was not ‘cool.’ We had a homosexual aboard my ship in 1942. We were escorting convoys out of Iceland. At night, the homosexual was going around to the different bunks and jumping the men. One night they’d had enough, and they threw him overboard. In the morning we called roll, and he was gone.”

  “Gone but not forgotten,” his wife said solemnly. Barb had been thirty-six. There were pigs in a blanket on a plate in the center of the table. Exactly the kind of detail, I thought, that someone suffering from intense sorrow would notice. The kind of thing that would burn deep into your memory. I stared at one pig in a blanket in particular. A particularly juicy one.

  After waiting an appropriate amount of time, I went to the bathroom. I knew Lori’s mother had some kind of intense arthritis, and sure enough, in the medicine cabinet I found a bottle of Percocet. A bottle of now and laters. I took three for now, three for later. By the time we got to the funeral parlor they started to take effect. The effect was deeply disappointing. A very faint white light, coming from the crack under a closed door. Nothing like raw. (I like it raw.) I remembered taking Percocet before, and it had always given a really intense and satisfying buzz. Something had changed.

  After a time we left in a convoy to go to the funeral parlor. I made Jenny stop at a gas station so I could get cigarettes, and then had to borrow money from her to buy them. The attendant yelled at me for lighting up next to a gas pump. When we finally walked through the door of the funeral parlor, I saw the father standing in the middle of the hallway. His powerful hands hung limply at his sides. He was crying. His solid square face was cracked and broken. Like someone had swung a baseball bat hard at the center.

  “What am I going to do?” he said. “What am I going to do?”

  The funeral parlor had deep brown carpeting. The walls were wood paneled. There was an oil painting of a house on one. Lori was standing at the entrance to the chapel. Her white face shuddered, opened and closed and opened around a single long sob. I walked toward her with my arms half-spread, mumbling condolences. She gripped me bone tight.

  “What am I going to do?”

  I sat in a pew and watched the procession of people file past the open coffin. Several had to be supported. One woman’s face looked like water going down a drain. The low sound of crying erased the edges of every other sound. Whispers, footsteps, thoughts, purse snaps, and even a faint singing rose and sank in the crying. It was a sea of tears, everything floated in it. Minutes floated by.

  The Percocet, after opening a tiny white hole in me, closed up like a wound. I grew restless. I looked at the brown wood-paneled wall of the chapel. Outside, the day was going off like an alarm. Cars shot out of alleys. People stood in lines at counters. They looked out windows. The tubes of outer space hung down through the gas sky. Letting in a little nothing. Inside the millions of suburban houses was something worse than nothing. Couches connected to carpets connected to refrigerators connected to televisions.

  The soft sounds of crying in the chapel sounded suddenly dry to me. Like a constant dry cough. The world was thirsty. It was thirsty for escape. It had died of that thirst.

  My father nudged me. It was my turn to kneel before the open coffin and look into it. I walked up, knelt down, and looked in. This is what a human face looks like, I thought. I have some perspective now, I thought. No, this is what you look like after you die, I thought. To someone else. This is what you always look like to other people, I thought. This is what I look like to my father and Funboy and Eva, I thought. This is who I really am, I thought. My thoughts moved fast, like I told Jenny. One connected to another connected to another connected to another. Something worse than nothing. After an appropriate amount of time I stood up and went back and sat down.

  I thought of telling Jenny to drive me out of there, but I knew nothing would be different anywhere else. I didn’t know where to score in Chicago. And even if I did, I couldn’t do it. It would be three days in a row. That would make me an addict. So I decided to just stay put. Better to turn in the slot I was in than to twitch out in the open. I closed my eyes and imagined a white hole opening in the middle of things. I imagined a white flood rushing over the desert world. I opened my eyes. There were white holes everywhere, but they were all dry. The father’s caved-in face, Lori’s open and shut and open mouth, Barb’s parted lips.

  White tops are white. I guess death is another meaning of the color white. Barb’s white face
in the coffin.

  In some ways, this association is misleading. I’d already overdosed once (in Holland with Eva), and I would overdose again. You could describe my behavior in a general sort of way as suicidal. But I never really believed I was close to dying, or that I could die, or that I was dying. Maybe I was too close to see it. Or maybe in white time, death is a difference that doesn’t make a difference. Think of Fathead, or Henry. Junkies tend to be drawn to metaphysical schemes in which dying is like moving a piece on a checkerboard, or like moving from one room to another, or even like moving around in the same room.

  The reality of death is something you don’t see until you are cured. When you can see it, it’s a sign you’re cured. When you are cured, you can see the difference death makes. It divides one world from the next. It divides each living moment from every other. Change. Wonder. Peace. Surprise. The fact of death is the deep source of health. But in white time, it’s a white line in a white room. I crossed over from Chicago to Baltimore about ten days after the funeral.

  I hadn’t planned to stay for so long and I wished I hadn’t. But it was just one thing after another, hanging around my dad’s house. When it got to be the time in the day when decisions are made, I’d usually be kind of drunk. I was doing a lot of thinking about certain problems my new lifestyle in Baltimore had confronted me with. For instance, if I did dope three days in a row, I’d be an addict. I believed that. It made sense. Don’t feed Gremlins after midnight, don’t do heroin three days in a row. Who would do heroin three days in a row? An addict.

  But I wondered how you were supposed to count three days in a row. I wondered if the first day you did it was “one.” Or maybe the space of time between the first day you did it and the next day would be “one.” And then the next day would be “two.” And then the next day would be “three.” So if you started on Monday, Friday would be the first day you’d have to stop to make sure you didn’t turn into an addict. Right? It was pretty confusing. When Funboy said, “Just don’t do it three days in a row,” he made it sound so easy. Of course, it was pretty obvious he’d failed at not doing it three days in a row. You could count it any way you wanted.