“Oh, I’m glad you didn’t, Mike. You mustn’t! Promise me.”
“I promise.” We sat in her living room talking about philosophy, and Milton, and rap. It grew dark. She was drinking wine; I was drinking tea. When the white light dimmed I went to the bathroom and tipped a little white powder onto the sink, sniffed it up, and flushed the toilet. When I came out I told her some stories.
“And then he told me that after the revolution, the slums would be filled with white people!” Nancy laughed merrily. I told her about how Funboy and I had stolen guitars from a music store and almost got caught. I told her about my stepmother’s sister, and fell silent for a few seconds, while she contemplated the depth of my hidden feelings. I told her about Charlie.
I began talking about Marx. I told her a joke about Queen Elizabeth. She laughed until she coughed, her cheeks were bright red, and her eyes were shining. I wished I were on the ceiling, looking down, the better to admire my performance.
Then she ruined it all. She took my hand. I stopped in mid-sentence. She kissed my open mouth. When her tongue pressed into my lip I could feel her heart beating. This was not what I’d planned.
“Come on,” she said. Her hand slid down my leg and back up, and back down. My rebel body responded. She kissed me. I kissed her. I pinched her nipples. She put her tongue in my ear. I massaged her inner thighs. I turned, bent, kissed, rubbed, and kissed again, thinking frantically all the time. What was I going to do? Dope doesn’t stop you from having sex, but it makes it absolutely impossible to stop having sex. No finish. You can’t come.
I knew this. I’d been planning Nancy’s seduction for weeks. But it wasn’t supposed to be tonight. I was going to make very sure I didn’t do dope the night we finally hooked up. But the dopeless night never came, and now it was happening. I was pulling her hair; she turned around to look nasty at me. The mirror showed an animal with four legs and two heads.
I had total control over it. Total control over my mind, her body, and the situation. The one thing I couldn’t do was the one thing I needed to do: lose control. The most natural and ordinary thing in the world, a kind of sneeze. A little muscular spasm, seven seconds of uncontrollable shudders and my triumph would be complete. But I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t not do it either. She’d know something was up.
She didn’t make it easy.
“I want you to come on my face.”
“Um, I don’t want to ruin your sheets. I love this color.”
“Never mind the sheets!” It had been a half hour easy. She was going all out. Everything she could think of. She could have used a wrench and a vise; it wouldn’t have mattered. I noticed the snow sifting down through the dark windows. I looked at her back when she was facing that way, her breasts when she faced this way. She was red-faced and sweating like a sailor. She was stronger than she looked. I had to admire her effort. I was afraid she was going to have a heart attack. There was no putting it off any longer.
“Oh God!” I cried. “Oh it’s happening, oh baby! It feels so good! Aaaarrggghh!” As soon as I’d said it I realized how fake it sounded.
“Oh Jesus yes!” My best wasn’t good enough. The room fell silent, the really bad kind of awkward silence it usually takes more than two people to generate. Saying the wrong thing at a funeral, for example. This was a fifty-person awkward silence. Maybe a hundred. Nancy lay still in it. I hadn’t been wearing a condom. She hadn’t let me. For men, successfully faking an orgasm requires either a very drunk woman, or technology. I had no technology and the exercise had sobered her up. She lay looking at me strangely.
“That was really awesome,” I said. Just ride it out. I was still as hard as a rock. The room was dark but my pupils were tiny pinpricks. Nancy wasn’t an idiot.
“Good-bye, Mike.”
Gaining control and losing control. One night that fall I dreamed I was JonBenét Ramsey. My white, white face floated in mirrors, in silver bowls, in huge, dark eyes. I put my tiny white hand in someone’s huge red hand. He followed me wherever I went. I could make him do whatever I wanted. I had total control. I stopped. He stopped. I knelt down. The vast dark bulk above me halved.
I charmed my follower’s huge hand like a snake. It moved toward me, fingers spread. I pointed at it. It stopped. It started moving again. I pressed against it. It kept coming. I pushed. The tiny muscles popped and wore out all along my arms and back, and still the hand moved toward me, the fingers closing. I saw myself in the huge white and red eye like the white dot at the center of a target. My white face. The eye closed on me like a trap.
Gaining control and losing control. Perhaps they’re the same after all. One makes more sense than two.
But that was an anomaly. I started telling people Nancy had raped me. I said it as a joke at first, for the shocked laughs. Then I kind of believed it. She wasn’t too pleased when it got back to her.
But that was just a misunderstanding. Not important. I really don’t know why I even put it in here. At the time, I hardly even noticed it, with all the new things I was learning. The little things, for example. I never knew about the cancer of the little things. Checking my mail, doing laundry, opening a car door, closing the door. I never realized how sick it was making me. Picking up the phone. Buying milk. I was a sitting duck. Walking across a floor or down a path. Driving somewhere. Waking up. It was killing me. It’s killing all of us. Some diseases you never know you have until you get the cure.
I got the cure. It came in white-topped vials. Sometimes they had red tops. The cancer of putting gas in my car in fair weather or foul without being high was history. The cancer of sober morning, the cancer of sober evening: history. The cancer of being vulnerable to constantly changing feelings. Exposed naked on the cliffs of your natural brain chemistry. Alternately scorched or frozen. Some days you’re happy; some days you’re sad. Fuck that.
Human life is like a Greek curse. Pushing a rock up a hill. Everything good is changing into something bad. And what’s almost worst, everything bad is changing too. Smiling or crying for no reason. On purpose or by accident.
When you’re human all things conspire against you. The terrible feeling of a sheet brushing against your naked skin when you’ve got a cold. No price is too high for escape. Stalin’s agents had cyanide capsules hidden in false teeth. I was the agent of the white revolution, and I had white tops hidden in my glove compartment, my desk drawers, my shoes, my allergy medicine bottles.
Perfect safety. Perfect freedom. Perfect comfort. Straight months of the invulnerable high. It closes all those doors, the doors that let in what you hate and let out what you love. The accordion doors of the lungs, the traitor heart mixing pain and time-poison with your blood. The hand door, the eye door.
Dope gives me a new, dope body. Closed like a fist. Of course I’m a little constipated, but that’s a small price to pay for total protection. No way for the time-poison, the change-poison to get in. I’m like a ball of metal. A thick spike of oxygen melts slowly in my center, where the lungs were. A white heart. I don’t know what the white heart does. It gets me high. I imagine it looks like a lump of dope. Like two big sugar cubes in a glass of milk.
And the way the world looks from deep inside the dope body! From high atop the white tower. The world. It would break your human heart to see it. Everything so smooth, gleaming so smoothly. So beautiful, so deep. My dope eye doesn’t have any bottom, and I see into the bottomlessness of things.
Eyes open for ten minutes without blinking. The world has a perfect geometry. The buildings above in the snowfall are all arcs and moons. The way ahead is all squares and triangles. Sleep is like the back of my hand, nothing mysterious. Same with death. Nothing to fear.
And when I wake, I’ve saved a half vial. I wake with that itching and twitching, the old human body thawing, the old creaking doors opening, letting in the time-poison, the human lungs starting up again. A little cold sweat on the forehead.
But it’s just tingles of anticipation. Savor it for a f
ew minutes. I can stop it anytime I want. Withdrawal lasts only as long as I let it. Make a cup of tea. Let my limbs ache and let sweat come out on my forehead. Watch my body stutter and shake like a zombie coming back.
And remember it like a prayer: This is the sickness of human life, the sickness I’ve been saved from.
Then do that half vial. Here comes the perfect world. The essay, where I left it. The thoughts have been burrowing while I slept. The morning is like a star that swallowed itself. Bright dust in space. And it still costs just ten dollars to keep my white metal angel body alive for another day. My exoskeletal astro body. My astro lungs, white heart, and hard, decorative marble genitals.
Nobody better fuck with me. Funboy got a foot up his ass when he came sniffing around. He owes me forty bucks. See you never, Funboy. I was copping from Tony. I always knew where to find him. I wrote my essays with ten dollars in each nostril. Todd came around in the sweet, deep afternoons. Am I making myself clear? I floated like an astronaut in the white world. I was in graduate school. Listen to the voice of the teacher:
“Our work at this institution concerns interpretation. Interpretation is the art of becoming open to the past. You wish to become a historian? To discover the past? Endeavor to become the future of the past you wish to discover. Endeavor to remember it.
“The documents we work with in this institution are not messages. Do not think of them as messages. They are not communications from one person to another. They are more like fossils than messages. More like the tools of an ancient people than fossils. Primitive and clumsy. Ridiculous, out of place, a scandal in the modern world.
“Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, for example. Delivered into your hands. Do you understand this document? Do you understand the past? Is your memory strong enough?”
Dear reader, I floated like an astronaut in the white world. October 1999. I sat on my ratty couch reading Walden for my seminar the next day. Imagine me there in my white space suit, heavy sound of mechanical breathing, my white eyes dim behind the glass shield of my helmet, the book spread out before me. I unhooked the ropes of words from the lines on the page, strung them between my bookshelf and the stars in my window, and they began to glow.
CHAPTER 10
Bloodless
What’s left of you when you change? Is there a part of you that doesn’t change? And if there isn’t, how will you even notice when the change comes?
I can’t say for you. I kind of noticed. I noticed I’d changed. At first I was relieved. I was relieved I couldn’t feel certain things. Like the boredom of waiting for my car’s gas tank to fill up. I couldn’t feel it. That was fun. Then it was fun, but a little spooky. Like putting a two-inch needle through your arm and not feeling it. Or feeling good. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.
It wasn’t what you might think. I wasn’t shocked by my white lips or red nostrils. I didn’t get freaked by the astronaut suit or the silver visor.
It was very quiet.
I was getting ready to teach class. I brushed my teeth, spat, and looked up into the mirror. I saw my body, my face, my eyes and lips there in the mirror. I also saw my bathroom wall, my sweater, the edge of the light fixture, and the back of the faucet. All these things (nose, wall, eyes, faucet) looked the same. The things looked the same as each other. I looked the same as the things. I didn’t see a difference between my face and the back of the faucet.
I’m not saying my face and the faucet somehow lost their proper forms or colors or melted into each other or something. Enough LSD or Robitussin can do that. I’m talking about a genuinely strange experience.
There’s a simple human feeling people get when they see themselves in the mirror. I don’t mean when you worry that your teeth look yellow or your hair looks flat. I’m talking about something beneath that, something basic.
There’s a simple basic difference between seeing your own hands or eyes and seeing a metal faucet. It’s not a sharp difference, like discovering the person sleeping next to you is a dead horse instead of your girlfriend. It’s not a big feeling, this felt difference between your hand in the mirror and the faucet, but it’s there. You’re reading this, you can see a fringe of yourself, your hand or maybe your hair, around this page of words. See?
Maybe you notice it, maybe you don’t. But when it’s gone you feel a little strange. A certain distance. I felt a little distant from myself. From that distance my hand and the faucet looked about the same. The way houses look from outer space. Black dots on black dots. Which one is yours?
Where had I traveled, to get that distance from myself? And did part of me stay behind, to notice how strange it all was? What was left of me when I changed? Where did it stay? And if nothing was left, then how could I even tell I was different? You see what I mean.
Because I’m not saying this change was totally obvious. I’m not saying I stopped caring about myself or anything. I’m not saying I stopped being able to walk around, or teach a class, or fall asleep, or read a book, or recognize a familiar face (even my own). I mean, I could still function very well. Pretty well. For a long time, another year or so, I was able to function just fine. It’s not like I had to get on my hands and knees to get across a room. (Not often, anyway.)
But humans have certain, almost invisible adaptations to this world. We’re made for these minutes and seconds and seasons. We’re sensitive to differences that don’t seem to matter, and are hard to describe. The human body has a grip on this world. The white body, the white eye, the white mind: It just doesn’t have the same grip.
I stood looking at my face in the mirror. It looked the same as the things. Not bad. Not good. A lot of white, though. Maybe it was the lighting? The metal faucet looked white too. There was an odd spreading brown bruise on my thumb. How had that happened? The phone rang. I threw up into the toilet and went back to bed.
What was there in bed? Memories of my computer game. I’d been playing a game called Civilization. In it, you try to take over the world. I set the difficulty level to “Easy.” I was playing the Germans. I had tanks, and my rivals, the Egyptians, were still using knights on horses.
As I lay in bed shaking from the bad dope I imagined line after line of horses meeting my tanks. I imagined the staccato of the tanks’ machine guns, then the heavy boom of the big tank guns, then the machine guns, then the dying horses, the bullets biting the knights’ faces, the boom of the big tank guns.
What happens when a tank shell hits a knight charging at full speed across a muddy field? A white fire. Bullets coming through the thick sunset, the thick Egyptian dusk. Like Morocco. Eva’s eyes swam up through the dusk like death kisses. Catching white knights unawares.
I imagined my capital, Berlin, surrounded by lush jungle. I had built the Eiffel Tower in it. It was the number one city in the world. The dope I was doing now was deep brown. It even tasted brown. I also had the number two, three, and five cities. Egypt had number four. Thebes. Brown like coffee. Do they smuggle dope in coffee? My hands shook. My legs were scratched to hell. My tanks approached Thebes inexorably. The valiant, doomed Egyptian knights sallied forth. The phone rang again.
The bullet-air was like a mouth chewing on the knights’ white swords and brown horse faces. Today was a Thursday. I had two hundred dollars of unusually deep brown dope on my dresser. It was making me sick. When I took it I got nauseous and threw up and lay in bed waiting for it to wear off.
As it began to wear off the nausea subsided and the first little shakes and fevers of withdrawal started. I got up and took shaky steps back over to the dresser and stared again at the bad brown dope. Can your eyes get bruised? Can you get bruises on your eyes? I did some more of the dope and the withdrawal shiver vanished.
I threw up again. I crawled back to bed. Do you know what immortality is? When you have tanks and they have horses, and death is a length of brown carpet between your bed and the dresser. Death is the toilet handle. Death is closing your right eye and opening your left eye. Then death
is waiting. Alive and waiting. Then death is opening your right eye and closing your left eye, then it is waiting again, and then it is throwing up.
Then, standing gasping over the toilet, I heard them. Through the thin body haze they appear: the immortal pixilated brown computer dope tanks.
Before children arrive at the stage of wanting to be firemen or soldiers, they pass through the stage of wanting to be fire trucks or tanks. Unkillable red trucks, unkillable brown tanks. I was sunk in the mud of that stage, the heavy brown treads of the dope tanks churning my memory to mud. And killing hundreds of thousands of people. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang.
Each time you call a dope fiend who doesn’t want to talk to you, that fiend’s hate spins down through time and memory and kills a living person.
In this way, when I was six, I learned of the death of one of my neighbors. She died behind the white face of her house. It got her there. Hate out of the future surprised her when she was lying down for a little nap after lunch.
She was a nice older lady. She wore white gloves and a blue dress. She had a nice car. My mother called us into the kitchen.
“Kids, you know how I told you Mrs. Nichols was sick?” We nodded. I shifted from foot to foot smiling. I had been in trouble for something earlier and was now perfect.
“Well, Mrs. Nichols passed away last night. God took her. She was old. She lived a good life, and she is in a happy place now.” I looked up at my mother and saw a half smile on her quiet church face. It was clear to me she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“How does that make you feel, kids?” While Mom was talking, my sister was creeping. Now she stood far enough away from me that Mom could just barely look at both of us without turning her head. Then Jenny crept a little farther away.
“Jenny, come back here! I want to talk to you kids.” Jenny crept back. Mom looked expectantly between our faces.
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