“Mrs. Nichols was our friend and neighbor,” Mom continued. She looked at us expectantly. Mrs. Nichols. A happy place now. A thing like that. What could one say?
“Who,” I asked, “is living in Mrs. Nichols’s house now?”
Who indeed? Friendly pairs of houses faced each other across our quiet street. Our house faced Mrs. Nichols’s. The enormous white face of Mrs. Nichols’s house still turned toward us. After Mom dismissed us, I sat out on our steps and looked back at it. My friend Dan rolled up on his Big Wheel.
“What’re you doing, Mike?”
“Nothing. Mrs. Nichols passed away,” I said.
“Who?” Dan looked puzzled. He lived eight houses down from us. Living so far away, I didn’t expect him to have heard of her.
“Nobody,” I said. I tipped my head back and looked at the white clouds, the blue sky.
“My teacher has arth-rit-is,” I told Dan, pronouncing the big word slowly. He went to Lincoln public school while I went to St. Mary’s Catholic school across town. My first-grade teacher’s name was Sister Pancraceous. My parents thought her name was funny. Sometimes when she dropped something my mother would laugh and say, “Goodness gracious, Sister Pancraceous!”
“My grandma has arth-rit-is,” Dan said. “Her hands always hurt.” I nodded.
“My teacher told us that she got arthritis because she used to fidget when she was a kid,” I said. “She said if we keep very, very still we won’t get arthritis.”
After lunch one day, Sister Pancraceous told us how to prevent arthritis. The whole class practiced sitting very, very still together. I remember looking curiously at my own limbs. They want to move so badly, I thought. Dan looked worried.
“How long do you have to keep still?”
“Not that long,” I said. “And you can save it up. Every minute you keep very still you are saving it up for the future.”
“Is that what you are doing now?” Dan asked.
“Yes. I just want to save up a little bit today.”
I tilted my head back and looked at the sky again. I was unaware of how strange it was for a child to stare at the sky. I was six. My looking was tuned to human faces. To the little or big people faces of toys, shoes, televisions, Mom, chocolate bars, houses.
Looking into the sky, I felt like anything could happen. The sky was like a face that had come apart. The clouds rose in Mrs. Nichols’s windows.
Dan climbed off his Big Wheel and sat down Indian-style. He stared hard straight into the grass. After he had saved up maybe forty seconds of stillness he started plucking single blades of grass and counting them.
“One…two…three.” I watched him. He wasn’t just picking any blade.
“What are you doing?” I said, crouching down next to him. He had an intense look of concentration as he scanned dozens of grass blades. The day had clouded over. The outside was like a room now. It was people time again. Who lived in Mrs. Nichols’s house? I poked Dan on the shoulder.
“Look at this one,” Dan said. He held a blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger. I bent closer.
“What’s different about it?” I asked, puzzled.
“Look at it.” Gripping the slender pale-green blade firmly between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he pressed the tip of the fingernail of his right pinky against a tiny place in the blade.
I looked closer and saw the grass blade was made up of hundreds of strands, like a white sheet is made up of hundreds of white threads. Dan was pointing to one of them. His little finger shook with the effort.
“You see it?” The single strand he was pointing at had a faint red color. There was a slender red strand in the grass blade. I followed the thread of color up and down the blade’s two inches, to where all the strands ended in a shiny green sheath.
“I see it,” I whispered. He nodded, and opened his left palm. There were two other grass blades in it. Each had one of the red threads.
“They’re red-blooded,” Dan said.
“Blooded,” I whispered. I plucked a grass blade and held it against the sky. The blade was woven of strands that were white and yellow and brown and yellow-white and white-brown and white-white. I was surprised I had ever thought grass was plain green. Dan looked at me disapprovingly. He took the blade I was holding out my hand and threw it away.
“Look for the red-blooded ones,” he said. He continued to search. “Four,” he said. “Five,” he said. I got down on my hands and knees and started to look.
I never found one. I saw the blood every time he showed me one of his. Every time he patiently pointed it out with his shaking pinky I could see it. But I never found a blooded blade of grass myself.
All summer on clear days Mrs. Nichols’s house looked at the sky. On overcast days it stared blindly out, with a milky film on the windows.
And from time to time that summer, sitting on the grass with Dan while he slowly counted, I would be seized with panic. It was like a test. Why couldn’t I find any? Why couldn’t I see the red-blooded ones?
I thought then it was bad luck. I think now it was my bad habit of looking at the sky. I stared at the sky and I think there were things I missed because of it. Who taught me that habit? The person who lived in Mrs. Nichols’s house after she died taught me. It taught me to look at the sky and now I couldn’t see the tiny thread of red in one out of a hundred grass blades. I couldn’t see the really small things, the things you can’t see from the sky even with a ghost’s eyes.
I could see the larger shapes. The shapes you might remember from twenty or a hundred years out. Something as big as a house, sure. And I could see the colors of the future. White, and sometimes brown.
I lay undead on my bed with white sheets made of white threads, looking down into the past. Dogshit brown dope on my dresser. Had this happened before? I wondered. Or was it just the memory disease? It makes things seem like they happen twice. The phone rang. When I got up to get it, the line went dead. I went back to bed. Maybe it was me, I thought. Prank calling myself from the future. A future of hate. Just then there was a crack as my bedroom door swung open at a thousand miles per second and Henry stood armless in my doorway. Half-armless. One-armed.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Your door was open,” Henry said. His inhuman form rose where it shouldn’t have, leaning there in my bedroom like the Eiffel Tower. Or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He looked at the dope on my dresser.
“Don’t even,” I said.
He shuffled over to the dresser and started doing magic tricks over the dope, honking softly, rambling.
“You shouldn’t just leave your door open, Mike…beautiful pile you got here…just a little too close to the edge of this dresser, huh…deep brown, huh…this is just going to blow away standing at the edge like that…not going to jump are you, little fellow…just let me help you there.”
He carefully adjusted the dope pile, moving it a little to the left, a little to the right. I thought I saw a straw between his fingers for a second and then it was gone.
The dope pile looked a little different when I finally got over to it on my bloodless brown dope legs. But I had to admit it was safer. Farther from the edge of the dresser. Henry was like insurance. Sometimes you have to pay a little to save it all. I looked at the smaller pile with love and hate. Henry excused himself and went to throw up in the bathroom.
“I didn’t leave my door open, Henry,” I said. “How did you get in?”
“It’s that nasty brown dope you got, Mike,” he said, sitting down heavily on my bed. “You shoulda told me but it’s OK. It happens. Damn Nazi dealers. Poison you to make a buck. The secret is to take it in little doses, just enough to hold off the jones, until you can get your hands on some good stuff.”
“I didn’t think you knew how to get to my place, Henry,” I said.
“Kurt dropped me off,” he said.
“For what?”
“You don’t remember?”
We stared at each other. I
don’t remember. Then we were in the car. I was driving. We stopped at a nice brick house in Guilford where Henry scrambled up to the door and handed a bottle of Oxys to a nice middle-aged woman and then came back to the car with the money. Then we went to Edmondson Avenue and scored six red tops. I fixed in a gas station bathroom off Route 40 just outside of downtown. Little phantom mouths flowered around my neck, releasing ten thousand years of pressure in a gust of brown gas. I looked into the bathroom mirror through the brown mist and the condensation and the claw marks of devils and I smiled.
When we slid out the gas station east toward Fells Point, several seconds were missing from every minute, and five or six words were missing from every sentence.
“Ye—es.” Henry said.
The sun hung at the summer angle that turns the feelings of mortals away from the sadness of eventual death, toward the sadness of endless life. Squirrels, dogs on leashes, white ladies, pigeons, snitches, and stray cats moved or stood along the sides of the road as we passed.
“Roll it out,” I said to the wheels beneath me. “Roll it out.”
“The cap-ital of California is Sacramento,” Henry recited. “The cap-ital of Arizona is Arizona City.”
An unreal high had its knife at my heart, and when we went over a little bump it pushed in the tip a little. I thought, Damn, there’s more to this shit than just how you feel about it.
“The cap-ital of Texas is Texas,” said Henry.
When we got to Dom’s, the door was ajar and we pushed on in. We were feeling a little like cowboys and a little like explorers. Relaxed like cowboys, but still looking for drugs, like explorers.
“Yoodle-ey-hee-hoooo,” Henry said into the bright heart-attack darkness of Dom’s place of residence.
“Up here, pardner,” said Dom with his voice.
We tramped slowly up the stairs. Henry went into the big open room at the end of the hall, while I swung into the bathroom. Dom was there, next to the mirror with his chin up, looking like he was shaving, unsteadily guiding a needle into his neck.
“Let me shed some light on the subject, Dom,” I said, pushing open the rag that hung over the bathroom window and revealing a neck that looked like a broken foot with the toes missing. “You’re going to kill yourself doing that in the dark.”
“I think I already did, son,” he said, pushing the plunger home. He straightened up, blinked a couple times, pushed the rag back over the hole, turned to me, held out his arm, and said:
“Shall we?”
“Such a gentleman!” I said, as he escorted me down the hallway.
Henry was sprawled full on the floor in the big room, with his head and face lifted politely and even elegantly up toward his approaching guests. He pulled himself up to a sitting posture as Dom and I took our seats on the floor.
“We’re glad you’re here today, Mike,” Henry said, “because today—”
“—is Henry’s birthday!” Dom said. They both beamed.
“Happy birthday, Henry,” I said.
“Got somfin’ for you, Henry,” Dom said. He turned behind him and rooted around in the pile of newspapers, empty cigarette packs, unopened condom packs, and gas-station hot-dog wrappers until he emerged with something long in a brown bag.
“What is it?” we breathed.
“A beer!” Dom unsheathed the twenty-two-ounce beer and placed it in the center of the room. We all craned over to look at it.
“A beer!” I said.
“A beer,” Henry said. “Look at that.” He looked at Dom, who turned shyly away.
“You shouldn’t have, Dom.”
“Well,” Dom mumbled, “I figured what the hell, a birthday only comes along once a year.”
“I guess it’s been so long I tasted a beer, I forgot what it tastes like!” Henry said. He picked it up gingerly by the neck in his single hand, and turned it a little in his palm. He did this by ungrasping his hand so the bottle would slip a little, turning as it slipped, then gripping it again. Grip, slip, turn, grip.
“Bud, too!” he said. “That’s a good brand.”
“The best,” I said. “Say what you like about Bud, it’s a very good beer. Everyone knows that.”
“They got all kinda ads and shit,” Henry said. “When’s the last time you seen an ad for Old Milwaukee?”
“I just thought that one looked nice,” Dom said. I could tell that now he was thinking maybe he should have got a forty, or even a six-pack. Maybe he was even getting a little sad about it. Henry looked at him.
“I just love it, Dom,” he said. “This is the best birthday present anyone has gotten me in as long as I can remember.” He paused. “Matter of fact, it’s the only birthday present anyone’s gotten me since…since I was a teenager.” Henry’s eyes were bright. He set the bottle on the floor and pushed it out to the center of the room.
“I want all of us to share it,” he said.
“No, Henry,” I said. “It’s your beer, you drink it.”
“That’s right, Henry,” Dom said. “It’s your birthday, this Bud’s for you.”
“No,” Henry said firmly, “everyone gets a sip.”
He nodded to me. I looked at Dom, who shrugged. I picked up the bottle gingerly and unscrewed the cap. Budweiser’s famous life-giving brown bubbles moved slowly behind the real glass. I sipped it, and as the potent warm juice dropped down my numb throat into my nonfunctioning guts I thought about beer. About how it was the universal beverage of good times and celebration.
I wiped my lips and passed it to Dom, who shook his head. I gave it to Henry. He drank deeply. Then set the bottle down and wiped his lips with the back of his uni-arm. He was smiling, smacking his lips. After a few seconds his smile disappeared.
“Beer sucks,” Henry said. “You gotta be a fucking retard to be a alcoholic.”
“No shit,” said Dom immediately.
I spit the piss left in my mouth out onto the floor.
Dom reached out with his huge bear arm and knocked over the bottle. The beer pooled out in long dirty streams collecting ashes and dirt and dried blood until the streams turned to black marks and stopped moving. We all started laughing. We laughed and laughed, sounding like vacuums trying to suck up tennis balls, laughing, laughing, our long dry tongues lolling back into our throats, laughing until the unabsorbed beer sprayed out of my nostrils and out of Henry’s half-toothless mouth.
When the laughter had died down and Dom had stopped talking and moving and almost stopped breathing collapsed in a pile in the corner—when that happened I leaned over to Henry, who was still smiling.
“Can I ask you a question, Henry?” I said.
“Anything, Mike,” he said. “It’s my birthday.”
“How did you get into my apartment today, Henry?”
Mrs. Nichols dies when I’m six. I look at the sky. The phone rings when I’m twenty-five, lying on my bed alternately sick from dope and sick from no dope.
Why did these things happen? What caused them? Did Mrs. Nichols’s death cause me to look up at the sky when I was six? Did my odd habit of staring at the sky when I was a kid cause me to become a junkie? And then, lying sick from bad dope, did my hate at that goddamn ringing telephone drop down through the past and kill Mrs. Nichols?
I’ll admit that these cause-and-effect chains are pure speculation. Does fidgeting cause arthritis? Sister Pancraceous fidgeted when she was a kid, then she got arthritis. You want to correct her? Punish her? A nice old lady like that? A nun, for God’s sake.
It’s not like anyone really knows for sure. Cause and effect is a famous mystery. One thing happens, then another. There’s an empty space between. No way to tell for sure. Connect the events as you like. Sister Pancraceous fidgeted, then she got arthritis. Simple as that, a straight line.
I prefer circles to lines. Mrs. Nichols’s death caused me to become a junkie, and my junkie hate came out of the future to kill her. She deserved it, in a way.
Sure, I want my life to look realistic, just like anyone w
ould. But cause-and-effect questions don’t always have realistic answers. Think about it. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Dom or Henry? Life or death?
I had stopped working on my dissertation, but I still sometimes scribbled little bits and pieces before I went to sleep. Not about the big questions. Practical writing: “Don’t Do Dope Today!!!” “Dope Kills!” “Get Help, I’m Worth It!” I left these little notes for myself all around my apartment. I was like a slogan writer for D.A.R.E. I also wrote a poem around that time. I still have it.
JULY
Dumber and harder to remember
The summer turns itself into
Those two junkies you were sure
Wouldn’t make it through the winter:
Dom and Henry, Henry and Dom.
And they are living in that house
Stripped down to that bone,
With that light on those boards.
Those plain and simple four:
The two that they are and the two they are not.
Henry found a bit of what he calls unloosening glue
Drip drip from the pipe under under
The sink. Gets a bit on his fingers gets
Unstuck from the thing, and then the other,
Then his grip comes loose going up
Like smoke rings.
And Dom burned a hole so deep in his wrist
He hides quarters there for emergencies.
If this is death, I don’t want to die. July.
The one time of the year
When the same unendingness of undeath
Is better
Than the monotonous Dom/Henry, Dom/Henry changes of death.
CHAPTER 11
The People
In Baltimore they call cops “knockers.” We had to watch out for the knockers. Cops dressed like junkies. Undercovers. They were hard to spot. I asked everyone I knew about their favorite way of detecting knockers. It was a survey.
“So how can you tell a knocker?” I’d ask.
“It’s easy,” Funboy said. “Knockers’re black. But the dope boys got it twisted. That’s why some spots won’t serve white fiends.”
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