White Out (14 page)

I wish I could find every pebble of gravel, every grain of dust and cigarette butt from that magic first-time roof. I’d bottle it all up in white-top vials. I’d have old-time junkies selling their wheelchairs for a hit of that shit. Dominic, Dorsom, and Betty would rise from the dead for a free hit of that, and I’d give them a free one. I’d give them one for free. Then I’d hold up another and make them answer my questions.

“Dominic, tell me what it’s like where you are now.”

Silence.

“Tell me or you can’t have a vial.”

“It’s empty, Mike. Like hailstones on mountains. Please just let me have one more. Just one more, you can’t imagine…”

Chip was setting up a Ouija board when Eva and I finally got up. Everyone else was gone except for Charlie, and Charlie didn’t look happy. Chip’s soothing voice was falling over him like coils of rope.

“It’ll be fun Charlie, relax. It’s just something to do, like checkers.” Charlie shook his head. He was wearing his sky blue suit with a thick fuzzy brown tie. It was night so there weren’t any colors.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Chip.” He looked worried. I couldn’t tell if he was just being dramatic or if he actually believed in the mystic powers of the cheap Parker Brothers Ouija board. Probably both.

“Something bad might happen.” If Charlie hadn’t somehow let slip that he was afraid of Ouija boards, Chip would probably never have pushed it. Charlie’s fear excited Chip. It was like an aphrodisiac.

“We’ll just try it for a bit, and if we don’t like it, we’ll stop,” Chip said soothingly. We took our places at the board’s four corners. I scratched idly. Dope makes you itchy. Sometimes you start itching and forget to stop. Henry said one time he got so high he itched and itched and itched all the way to China. He only had one arm when I met him.

“What do we do, Chip?” Eva asked. He produced the planchette.

“We close our eyes, we ask the spirits a question, we all put our hands on this, and it’ll move around the board stopping at different letters.” It was still very hot on the roof. The sun had gone but it had gone into black, fuzzy bodies. The square roof buzzed with the heat. A discarded beer can glowed black with heat. I looked out over the city. The spaces between the lights looked like stuffed mouths. In the blackness, Eva’s black fists looked like full cheeks. Electricity traveled two inches from the top of my stomach to the bottom of my throat.

Charlie sighed. “If we’re going to do this, we should do it right.” He threw his head back and closed his eyes.

“Everyone clear your mind. Close your eyes.” The two were the same for me. Eva giggled. Opening my eyes I saw Chip’s hand snaking between her thighs. Charlie’s teeth glowed black in the no-light.

“Who are you, spirit?” The tips of our fingers gently touching the planchette, we pushed it in circles.

“Who are you, spirit?” We pushed it in circles. Eva moaned softly. I opened my eyes and looked at her. She looked directly into my eyes. Her mouth opened. Chip’s forearm rose from her crossed legs.

“Who are you, spirit?” The planchette buzzed softly under my fingertips. It stopped circling and jutted across the board. Charlie’s eyes snapped open.

“M.” Charlie was in control. And maybe someone else. Charlie was like two helicopter blades spinning so fast they looked like one.

“O.” The planchette jagged and squittered. Chip had only one hand on it, the rest of us had two.

“M.” A little electric twist started in me and crushed itself out on my stomach walls. “I really have to go to the bathroom,” Eva said. Her cheeks were flushed. She swayed her hips a little into Chip’s forearm.

“Y.” “Do you have to go special bathroom, Eva?” Chip’s smile started in the bones of his face and headed southeast, toward Philly.

“I.” Three weeks before I had a dream that Chip came into my room in Big Five holding a grocery bag filled to the top with white powder. I didn’t want any. We argued. He gestured wildly. He dropped the bag, a white cloud rose up from it, and I inhaled it accidentally. Chip laughed. “You’re going to die.” I stumbled outside to the street. The sun white on the pavement, no-time rising in my eyes. I dropped to my knees, dying, and woke up.

“T.” “Oh God!” Charlie said.

“Oh God,” Eva whispered.

“Mommy It,” Charlie hissed through gritted teeth. “Fucking Mommy It. I’ve had nightmares.” He lurched up, shambled over to the edge of the roof and began retching and barfing. As soon as I heard him retching, a thing came loose in me. Tears filled my eyes and sweat popped out on my forehead.

“I’m going to be sick.” I got up, swayed, and then threw up on the roof three feet from where Eva sat red-cheeked and open-mouthed with Chip’s stiff forearm rising from her crotch.

“Oh my God!” She propped herself up on her hands and threw up into the spot where I’d been sitting. I was still going. I felt like I was throwing up toes and knucklebones. I felt like the skin on my feet was coming up.

“I hear dope makes you sick the first time,” Chip said, standing up and looking distastefully around.

“But I didn’t do any!” Charlie wailed from the edge of the roof.

“The spirits made you sick, Charlie.” The air was thick with retching. I couldn’t get enough. Steady streams of puke. I was backward hungry. Starving. Oh God, was that red in my vomit? Was my ulcer back and bleeding? I threw up fresh yellow gruel over the old. I couldn’t see it. I frantically started digging in it with my hands to see if I could find that red streak again.

“Hey, Eva,” I moaned. “Come over here and see if I’m throwing up blood.” She crawled over on her hands and knees. I pointed at the colored mess and she instantly threw up on it.

“No!” I yelled. “Now you’ve covered it up. Help me dig it out.” I put my face three inches over the muck and began trying to peel back the layers with my fingers. It was subtly differentiated, like the changing colors of a Gobstopper, or the rings on a tree, or the gremlin bubbles on a wet Mogwai’s back. When you get Mogwais wet they multiply. That’s where Stripe came from.

I was frantically trying to think of things to keep myself from throwing up. I thought of Eva’s pussy. I threw up rolls of dead skin in seltzer water. I threw up dry birthday cake. There was nothing left. Yes there was! My teeth! My parking tickets! I was vomiting up everything connected with me. My shoelaces! Candy Land! My first cigarette! Charlie ran over for some idiot reason, slipped in the three-foot vomit slick, hit his elbow and threw up sideways onto the Ouija board. Eva was crying and laughing and hiccupping and vomiting.

The smell suddenly rose from the hot roof in a tidal wave. It knocked Chip back, who’d been resisting, and he dropped to his knees and threw up. I was still going. It was a vomit orgasm. I was being pulled through sensitive holes in liquid form. Time and space started to come apart. It was like the formation of the earth, the birth of the continents, the beginning.

It was still. Charlie was snoring. Eva, exhausted, was still propped up on her elbows breathing heavily. Chip stirred behind us.

“I’m kind of horny,” he said.

“Oh God!”

“I can’t help it,” he continued, “Eva, you look hot even with puke on your lips.” He wriggled nastily behind us. My cheek was pressed against the hot roof and my eyes were closed.

“You look even hotter all nasty like that.” Chip was a famous pervert.

“You’re a potty hotty, Eva,” he went on. “Baby want to go potty with you. Baby gotta go bathroom. Baby gotta go special bathroom.”

“Gross, Chip.” She stayed motionless. I felt disgusted and a little jealous, but what could I say? She was technically his girlfriend.

“You know what?” Eva said thoughtfully. “Even when I was throwing up I didn’t really feel sick. Like it was happening to someone else.”

I thought about this for a little bit. I didn’t really feel anything. I started to say something but then I stopped. I felt like I’d forgotten something important, but I didn’t know how to put it, and I didn’t really feel one way or the other about it. Best just to rest.

I looked at the cooling vomit slick. Fuck it, if I could somehow reach back and get my hands on that shit I’d bottle it up too. Sell it in white-top vials. I’d use it to make the ghosts answer my questions. Do you remember me, Dominic? Do you remember your first time?

CHAPTER 7

L
ast night I woke up at 2:00 a.m. covered in sweat. As I write this, I teach at the University of Michigan. I spent the last week working on the introduction to the academic book I’m writing and it’s a little tangled. It’s not clear as day, put it like that. It isn’t crystal clear. My position in the department is unstable. Uncertain. I feel like everyone hates me. My own former advisor doesn’t understand what the hell this book is about. It’s about the philosophy of the price system. He says, what is that? I try to tell him haven’t you ever felt you were part of a giant nervous system?

I’m biting the hand that feeds me. I can’t help it. It’s my inspiration. I moved here to Ann Arbor recently and the new friends I’ve met aren’t exactly top shelf, put it like that. My old friend Alix called. She just moved to Seattle and complained about her new friends. “All they care about is money.” She’s going sailing with them on Sunday. My friends here are more likely to have wheelchairs than sailboats.

I have to get out of here. I’m thirty. I hate Ann Arbor. I have to get a new job this fall and the market is terrible. And I didn’t move here so recently. I’ve been here over a year. I’ve broken up with two serious girlfriends in the past eighteen months. I hate it here. I’ll never get a new job. People will think I’m crazy. I am crazy. I’ll be stuck here slipping lower and lower in the department, finally falling out. I’ll be sticking up gas stations with a screwdriver.

They won’t let me have a gun, are you kidding? They know my record. They say it was expunged. Bullshit. Plus I’m not breathing right. It’s the humidity. Yesterday I think I saw one of those old tenured professors shuffling down the hall holding his toothbrush. I’m supposed to pitch my secret late-night insights about the price system to these people? They just want somebody to prove to them that they are never going to die. They want magic tricks.

I’ll give them one. Are you kidding? I’ll do anything. I’ll switch things up. How about that? Originality is highly prized. The unexpected. I’ll write a brilliant article telling them exactly when they’re going to die. The day and the hour. It’ll be pretty soon too. They’ll love it. Creepy? You just don’t know; they’ll eat it up! You have to know how to talk to these people. You can’t go around treating them like princesses. They won’t respect you.

“Did you see that young Clune’s brilliant new paper? It says I’m going to die next month. Really die. Think about it. The end. He’s a genius.” I can’t deal with these academics. And the people outside the university are forty times worse. They’ll attack you in broad daylight. A normal job? They won’t even let you write in peace. Hell no. The real-world bosses stand right over you while you type.

“What’s this? A letter? A word? All we deal with here are numbers! Figures! Just write down the numbers. Is that so hard? Just look at the numbers on this sheet here and type them in that space there.” The bitter reality of the price system I’m in love with! It’s ironic.

But my vision concerns the future. A beautiful, pure economic world is hatching inside their cubicles and calculators. The vast nervous system of the world insect. Their own heads are the chrysalis. Can you see the slender antennae of the idea of my book? Waving over the cubicle? No? The bubbles on the Mogwai’s back? The Gremlin’s scaly finger on the chainsaw? The eviction notice under my apartment door? The Final Girlfriend? I see our squat shadows on the horizon. In the future. We’re both three hundred pounds and bald. We’re eating quietly at Ponderosa. “Are you going to finish that?” Is this why I got clean?

By now I’m throwing myself around on the bed. I’m sweating. Panting. Twisting. Turning. Moaning. Anyone looking in would think I was fucking someone. But I don’t have a girlfriend now. We broke up. I’m fucking myself. I need to relax.

I must be going crazy. “Is this why I got clean?” Ten days ago I saw Cash for the first time in months. I’m worried about my introduction. Cash was sallow, skinny in the fat places, fat in the skinny places. Sick. Stuttering. He never used to stutter. Mumbling about fire prevention. Hardly making a pretense. “I kind of sleep a lot.” In hell. In white hell, white frosted eyes. White lips, white freezing tongue. I’m a little apprehensive about a footnote, I’m wondering about phrasing. He’s dying. He’s been where I’ve been and never got out. “Is this why I got clean?” Where’s my gratitude?

Gratitude. I lay awake in the dark. Gratitude. The very word is like a bell, tolling me back from me to the quiet room. The clean sheets. Gratitude. The darkness. Gratitude. The sound of my breathing. The sound of the fan, turning slowly, gratitude. Gratitude. I lie there until I’m transparent. Until the clean sheets below me can see the ceiling above me. Until they can see it clearly. Until the sound of the fan is alone in the room.

This morning I arose refreshed, smiling for no reason. This is why I got clean. I didn’t know it then. The cure keeps working also. Growing. I said the first time I did white tops lasts. The cure lasts too. The way out of the white out. It gets stronger. At first I saw only one way out. Now I can see more ways. That pine tree outside my window, for example. A hundred little branches at least. And each little branch has sixty green needles. That’s six thousand.

Where was I last night at 2:00 a.m.? Where am I when I’m knotted and tangled up in myself? The roof at Chip’s? The future? Candy Land? Who knows? But every road leads out of it. Every thing. In a little while or a little longer. Thousands of exits. Pine needles. The sound of my breathing. Gratitude.