Imagine Me Gone (31 page)

As is the way of things, I was forced to take more Klonopin to get through the days. Dr. Bennet had written me for a decent supply to tide me over during the transition, but I’d run through it in a jiffy. Then I went through the batch that Dr. Greenman, my new shrink at the University Department of Mental Hygiene, had prescribed before a month had passed. The first time, she obliged me with an early refill, and she did it again a few weeks later, as any humanitarian would. But after my third request she began exhibiting signs of moralism, suggesting I needed to be more disciplined.

By then, the sweating had commenced. Night sweats were one thing. I was used to waking in soaked sheets; bedding could be laundered and the day needn’t be lost. But sweating through my shirt before making it to the bus stop was a real drag. The temperature had nothing to do with it. Wind could be blasting off the steppes of Michigan and still my pores ran like broken faucets, my skin as slick as a clapped donkey in July. In seminar, I hesitated to raise my hand lest the stench of my underarm waft across the table. But I’d waited a long time to get here and I wanted to contribute, so I started bringing a washcloth and an extra set of clothes with me onto campus each day, to towel off and change before class.

The program was affiliated with a mentoring scheme for minority high schoolers, and with Caleigh’s encouragement, I signed up to volunteer two afternoons a week. They paired me with a sophomore named Jaylen. Our first task was to work through a review book for the state English test. But after ten minutes muddling through a Marge Piercy poem, I commented on his Juicy J T-shirt, and we got sidetracked on a discussion of the Memphis origins of crunk. I concurred in his judgment that Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was a mainstreamed train wreck by an otherwise innovative crew, and that Juicy J himself bore much of the responsibility, given his brand-expansion ambitions. This was around the time that Oris Jay (aka Darqwan) finally got around to releasing another Sheffield bass record on his homegrown Texture label, and I suggested that if Jaylen really wanted to give his thorax a shake he check out some British dubstep. Which I’m happy to say he did. By our third meeting it was clear I had more in common with him than I did with my fellow grad students. For one thing, we were both fifteen (at the level of the psychic), we listened to inordinate quantities of dance music, and as far as I could tell, we were both attracted to his English teacher.

I did my best dragging him through Abigail Adams’s correspondence and
Newsweek
excerpts on paragliding, but at the bottom of the sessions we always circled back to what we were listening to. When I mentioned I had a subwoofer in the trunk of my car, he asked if he could hear it, and I ended up driving him home to the beat of a Torsten Pröfrock / Monolake workout from Berlin. Rolling through the streets of Lansing with him, I realized I hadn’t had anyone else in the car since arriving in Michigan, and certainly no one to listen to music with. I rather appreciated the company. Unlike my family, he never asked me to turn the volume down. And really, what would I have done all these years without a monster sound system in my car? Where else, beyond the walls of a club, can you experience bass loud enough to wipe your memory clean without complaint from the neighbors? Sound systems are what turn cars into escape vehicles, even if you’ve got nowhere to go. A drive to the convenience store is five minutes of that storm blowing in from paradise. I’ll take the sneers of oldsters at intersections expecting gunfire. The relief is too rare to give up for civility’s sake.

Jaylen was understandably wary of me, but excited to suddenly be a font of pre-releases for his friends, who couldn’t believe he’d got his hands on a bin full of screwed and chopped tracks they hadn’t even heard of. I didn’t review much anymore (not wanting to write about Moby turned out to be a real professional liability), but the records and press releases still arrived by the bushel, adding to the stacks Alec thought I should be putting up on eBay. I started giving most of the non-dross to Jaylen. I’d fill a bag with CDs and the odd twelve-inch, and offer it to him when I dropped him off. I’m sure I went on too long when we happened upon a snippet of Wordsworth or a James Baldwin quote in his review materials, but he didn’t seem to mind. You’re weird, he said. How come you’re not a professor? I told him that I was nominally in training to become one, but that I wasn’t sure if the modern academy was sufficiently politicized for me. You should meet my mom, he said, she always votes. I’d seen his mother in their driveway a few times, and she’d offered a wave. Luckily her looks were not of such force as to arrest me at first sight, but I certainly had no objection to his suggestion that I make her acquaintance.

I appreciate you helping Jaylen, she said, when I brought him home one afternoon. I hope he’s not asking you for all that merchandise you’re giving him. That child is spoiled enough. I get it for free, I said, it’s no trouble. So you’re over at MSU, she said. I’m still working on my bachelor’s over there. I keep saying I’ll finish in time so when he’s getting out of high school we can graduate together, but we’ll see if I make it.

Thank goodness that even at greater proximity she didn’t trigger in me the obsessional rush, tensing my gut or goading me into telling her that I loved her. The moment had a gentler aspect. I didn’t converse with many people outside of seminars. Weekends were empty—only phone calls, and always the apartment in silence when I hung up. Yet I didn’t feel the necessity to romance this woman. I only wanted to go into the house with the two of them and share a meal. But then I heard Caleigh’s voice saying, Flipper, don’t be a creep. So I kept it to pleasantries and took my leave.

When I raised my uncontrolled perspiration with Dr. Greenman, she asked if there was anything I was particularly anxious about at the moment. Like, say, the Feds trying to garnish my fellowship checks for back taxes? Or your refusing to write me a script for enough medicine to get by? Or that I waited so long for this chance to get everything down, from George Clinton to the Finland Station, from slave ships to Holocaust studies to the echo of loss in the speed of a high hat, only to find my concentration shot? But I didn’t want to be rude. She was a basically sympathetic woman, in her wide-wale cords and cable-knit seasonals. I believed her concern for my condition to be genuine, even if her rectitude about prescribing controlled substances blinded her to the fact that my need for them at this point was nothing more or less than a way to make it through the hour.

What could I do? I began trolling for benzo equivalents on the Internet, where people seemed to agree on the utility of kratom, a quasi-opioid tea drunk by Thai fieldworkers that apparently took the edge off in a serious way. The FDA hadn’t gotten around to banning it, so I ordered a pound and got started. It had no place in an aromatherapy regime, but neither did people with actual problems. Its effect was akin to strong coffee laced with high quantities of Benadryl. I consumed it every morning. That’s how my days began: more Klonopin than the doctor ordered, a thermos of coffee, a mug of kratom, three or four legacy meds, a few hundred milligrams of whatever Dr. Greenman was pushing, followed by a hot shower. By November, I’d largely given up on my course reading, let alone any assignments past due, which made attending my seminars less relevant and even inappropriate. My mother would only worry if I told her, as would Celia and Alec. I talked to Caleigh about it, but she chastised me, saying that even if I didn’t write brilliant essays, I needed to keep up with the work. This was my chance, she said. This was how I would find a job.

On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I did my best to gather myself with a change of shirts and an extra cup of kratom before driving over to the school to pick up Jaylen. The idea was that we meet for the first month in the safe space of the school and then, once trust had been established, we could venture out on our own. Mentors were asked to keep tabs on their mentees’ academic progress, but we weren’t required to limit ourselves to that. Mostly Jaylen and I drove around Lansing with the subwoofer.

I’d started playing him old-school stuff I thought he should know, music I hadn’t listened to in years, Larry Levan garage mixes, Afrika Bambaataa, Neil Young, anything with an ache of the real. When I got to Donna Summer, though, he balked. You’re just trying to mess with me, he said. That’s fag music. To date, he’d struck me as a mild-mannered kid. As for his mother, on the spectrum of the politics of black respectability, she fell somewhere in the hesitant middle, of small enough means to preclude class pretensions but scared enough for her son to want him to toe a line she never had. Music seemed like their compromise, the thing she didn’t try to control. He could visit the imaginary power of making his white classmates fear a black planet, but still turn the music off and get on with the business of getting on. But that masculine fantasy left no room for Donna Summer or Diana Ross or, for that matter, Nina Simone or David Bowie. They queered the pitch. Telling him that my younger brother was a respectable, middle-class homosexual didn’t seem like it would do the trick. Instead, I played him the last twenty seconds of Summer and Moroder’s “Our Love,” where the synth begins to pulse and drip over the beat like chemicals made to dance, and I told him, There is no techno without this. It’s the genealogy of what you already love.

When we got to his house, his mother, Trish, was just pulling in. I could offer you some coffee, she said, if you like. They lived in a one-story brick house with a front sitting room used only in the event of company. The couch and chairs were covered in clear plastic to protect the fabric, which I was glad for, relieved that my dampness wouldn’t make a stain. On the glass-top coffee table was a bowl of dried flowers, russet and dusty pink. Jaylen sat uneasily on the far end of the couch from me, and rolled his eyes when his mother said she’d love for him to go to MSU when he graduated high school. He’s already a Spartans fan, she said, so why not? Because I don’t want to stay here, he said. She cast a chastising glance at him, then turned to smile at me.

Do you have your own kids, she asked, hopefully. Yes, I said, I have a son and a daughter. They’re six and eight. Oh, that’s just the best, she said, and laughed. By the time they get to this one’s age they’re nothing but trouble. Though he’s better than his sister. She’s already living at her boyfriend’s and there wasn’t no use trying to stop her. You must be run off your feet with those two, she said, and here you are taking time to help Jaylen.

They don’t live with me, I said, they’re with their mother in Chicago. I go there to visit them. I could feel Jaylen’s eyes on me, but he said nothing. Well, at least you do that, she said, philosophically, at least you do that. Sweat flowed down my torso and I could only hope she didn’t smell it. It’s Jaylen’s turn to make dinner, she said, he’s doing tacos. You’d be welcome to stay.

After a few extra Klonopin in the bathroom, the scene became quite ordinary: the overhead light in the kitchen, the shredded Kraft cheese, Jaylen’s dogging his mother for pestering him not to eat so fast. Even the conversation about what I studied, which usually confused people, seemed ordinary enough. When you live most days alone in a room with a tiger kept from pouncing on you by nothing more than your constant stare, being poured a cup of Pepsi can feel almost Christlike in its mercy. It seemed perfectly natural to tell his mother, when she asked, that I had grown up on the south side of Chicago in an extended, mixed-race family. Oh, Flipper, Caleigh would say later, and we would argue. But there I was, eating dinner with the two of them, and we were jovial.

Despite my repeated insistence, they wouldn’t let me wash the dishes. They mistook it for a chore. They didn’t know the pleasure it would give me, or what that pleasure would count for. But I was their guest, and so I desisted. It was already dark out, the early darkness of winter evenings, when six o’clock seems like midnight. Jaylen’s mother turned on the outside light, and I thanked her for the hospitality on the way out to my car. Be safe out there, she said.

Driving back to the apartment, I wondered if it was the anxiolytics that had padded my longing with enough cotton wool to allow for a bit of glancing human contact without injury or fever, or if letting go a bit of the truth is what had helped me to reach that clearing.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who’s ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

I woke the next morning at five in soaked sheets and a panic. With water from the bedside table, I took my last Klonopin and went straight to the stove to put the kettle on for kratom. I did the yoga stretches Celia had taught me, and after that I sat upright in a hard-backed chair for five minutes trying to breathe intentionally, as it said to do in the pamphlet she’d given me on self-soothing. For some reason, when I finished I was still thirty-six, single, and about to die. I called Dr. Greenman for a refill but the secretary in Mental Hygiene said she was out for the day. I had run the morning routine but still the terror reigned. It was then that I checked my e-mail and read the message from the university saying that pursuant to a letter from the Department of Education about a previously undisclosed episode of default, they were putting a hold on the loan disbursement I needed for my rent and food.