White Out (29 page)

Skies and roads and buildings have that taste now. I taste it when I sit still long enough for the sadness to vanish. It takes about half a second. Then that taste. Metallic like fear and metallic like joy. Like blood or like metal. Who am I? I’m running out of examples.

I have a few left. Cat called me last week. I hadn’t spoken to her for months, since before I came to Florida. That last conversation before I moved had been brief and unsettling.

“Hey, Cat, I was just calling to say hi,” I said.

“Oh, hi Mike.” Her voice had some far-off spaces in it. Like on vacation when you give some teenager your camera to take a picture of you and your girlfriend against the view. When you get it back, you see your two tiny heads perched frightened in the lower left corner of the endless sky.

“This is a difficult conversation for me,” she concluded.

“Oh, well I can call back if—”

“I’m in love with someone,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. I felt vaguely crushed.

“You really don’t know?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ll be so upset…” Her voice trailed off. It was the middle of the day. “Look, I can’t have this conversation right now.” She hung up.

It bothered me. I felt ashamed that it did. It wasn’t as if we were together. She’d broken up with me definitively five years ago, when she learned of my arrest in Chicago. After I got clean and came back to Baltimore, we went out a few times, then stopped. I was alone for almost a year, then met someone, fell for her, moved in with her, and broke up with her just as Cat was returning from Italy, where she’d been for a year and a half. We went out for dinner and she wore a blouse made of old lace. It was translucent. She was more beautiful than ever. At my bare apartment, with the full moon coming through the cheap curtains, she whispered, “I want to make you happy.” She unscrewed the part of me that juts into the world with the other solid objects and it came loose and fell off and there was nothing solid left.

In moments of passion people sometimes say that they “forget themselves.” But this self-forgetting is notoriously unreliable. It’s like your lover telling you she’s forgotten all about what you said when you were angry. I wanted a more complete forgetting. I didn’t want to forget myself; I wanted to be forgotten. Love was one way. I wanted to come, not in the way you forget yourself, but in the way someone who passes you in the street forgets you. Freedom. I knew I never gave Cat any freedom like that. I resented her sometimes.

When I moved to Michigan she flew out a few times to see me. The last time she stayed a week. It was a disaster. She said she’d been diagnosed with adult attention deficit disorder and was taking some pills that helped her focus. The pills focused Cat into a blinding light that burned holes in the little routines that kept my days together. She’d race in while I was getting dressed.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Getting dressed,” I said.

I couldn’t seem to find my belt. She picked up a book lying on the dresser.

“What is this?”

I opened my mouth to tell her, but she’d already lost interest.

“I’m bored as hell,” she said.

“Cat, have you seen my belt around?”

“I think I threw it out,” she said absently. “I cleaned up a bit while you were in the shower. You keep a lot of senseless junk around this place, Mike. You take
forever
in the shower. It’s wasteful. I can’t sleep.”

Cat had always been a very tidy person. The pills focused her into a Cat laser. I turned it off. We stopped talking for a while. I met someone else, and started dating her. We broke up a year later when I moved to Florida. Then, with her uncanny timing, Cat called. I called her back, and that’s when she told me she’d fallen in love. She didn’t say who.

“You really don’t know?”

How would I know? She was still living in Baltimore. I didn’t like any of her friends. She’d dated a couple famous people and a couple rich people; maybe it was in the news? I let it drop, though it stung.
Maybe this is finally the end
, I told myself.

Then she called last week. I saw the number on caller ID and hesitated. I was afraid she was going to tell me she was married. I took a breath and answered.

“I haven’t heard from you in ages,” I said cheerfully, biting down my anxiety. My cheerful voice. That voice is shallow, but it is unafraid. Keep it close. “It’s been ages since we talked. I’m living in Florida now; it’s beautiful here.” I spoke cheerfully; I listened carefully.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I haven’t called before,” she said. “I’ve had a pretty awful summer.” The careful one inside me smiled.

“Oh no,” I said neutrally, thinking this means she’s not married, thinking why do I care, “anything in particular?”

“Well,” she said inhaling, “I…um…I was hospitalized. Twice.”

“What?”

“Oh, um. It’s still not very clear to me.” Pause. “The first time they, ah, I, was upset. And the police took me to the hospital. They kept me there for ten days. I kept asking why. My mother had to come from Texas to get me out. Then I was going to drive home to Texas. But I had a panic attack while I was driving. In Virginia. They kept me for three days, I think, maybe a little more.”

“My God, that’s awful,” I said.

“Diagnosis amphetamine psychosis, ha. It’s like a poem. It was the mostest…”

“It was the pills you were taking. I knew it.”

“Yeah…you were right. You’re always right. And now I can’t concentrate. The pills, I miss them. I can’t concentrate. I need to go to concentration camp. The old Cat is gone. Dissolved.”

“Don’t say that. You sound better now. Like yourself. Those pills made you strung out.”
Those fucking pills
, I thought. “Maybe you should sue the psychiatrist who prescribed that shit. These psychiatrists are criminals!”

“He tried to help me,” she said gently. “You see, Mike, those pills were the last chance to fix me, and now they’re broken…”

“Everything is going to be OK,” I said. “Everything is going to be fine.” I said it cheerfully. Dear reader, dear Cat, please don’t smile! The cheerful voice is shallow, but it doesn’t fear death. It isn’t afraid of anything. And it has no memory.

When you suffer from the memory disease, you need a little forgetfulness. Just a little. Just a little bit more than will fit in your human life. If you suffer from the memory disease, you need a forgetting that starts right now, turns, heads back toward your birth, passes it, and keeps going. When I got out of jail on January 1, 2002, everything reminded me of heroin. Even my lawyer.

On the afternoon of January 5, 2002, my lawyer sat before me. He was wearing a tie and had a light heroin complexion. His office was on a high floor of a high office building that reminded me of getting high and being high. The lawyer was moving his lips for money. My father’s money, not mine. I didn’t have any. If I had, I would have been high.

The lawyer had gotten the initial hearing pushed back six weeks. As a condition of my bond, I was not supposed to leave the state. Or carry a weapon. And so on. I kind of wondered what it would be like if the lawyer would just move his lips in the dark, in the place where I wasn’t. It wouldn’t be bad, I thought, but it wouldn’t be too great either. I listened while my father and the lawyer debated what was more dangerous, shipping me to a treatment center outside the state for a month, or leaving me here and risking my rearrest when I tried to cop. Which I admit had crossed my mind.

“Now Michael,” the lawyer said, “I don’t mean to suggest—and I certainly don’t believe—that you were in Ogden Courts for the reasons the arresting officers attribute to you. But—and I’m absolutely not suggesting any guilt here—do you think you will find it difficult—perhaps for reasons I don’t need to know—to stay away from that location? Will you find it difficult—for personal reasons, let us say—to refrain from visiting that or any other location that would give rise to the appearance—and appearances can be deceiving—of an intention such as that alleged in this report? The intention to buy, to use, or to sell narcotics?”

“I—”

“There’s no way,” said my father. So the lawyer agreed to my being sent to a facility to be treated for my propensity to give the appearance of buying, using, or selling narcotics.

After we’d seen the lawyer, my father dropped me off for a brief visit with my mother. She was upset. I also discovered she’d had pneumonia recently. I excused myself, went to her bathroom, and found and drank that half-full bottle of codeine cough syrup. I blamed her for everything.

“You have to think of your future,” my mother said.

“I know, Mom,” I replied. I burped red.

That night I drank a six-pack of beer and ate some Valium. I went out in the cold to smoke a cigarette. The outside was full of distances that didn’t go anywhere. The black sky droned, like a phone off the hook. Everything is going to be fine.

On the airplane to the treatment center, there were tantalizing glimpses of high speeds and vast distances. The world seemed to have enough space in it to lose me. That was kind of reassuring. It didn’t do anything material for me, but it was like a little promise. A little “everything is fine” message. But it was also kind of like an old spy movie when the spy holds the message up to a mirror and it says something quite different. I was frightened.

Once when I was little with a fever watching television in a hotel room while my parents were downstairs at a party, the television played an old spy movie. The bad spy, silver and black like a melted mirror, held up the two words of the secret message. I don’t think I could read then. I may have been closer to death than my parents ever knew.
And now no one knows
, I thought. I looked out the plane at clouds like secret writing.

The treatment center bus picked me up at the airport on January 7. At the intake desk they asked me some questions, I told them some lies, then they put me in a hospital room and monitored my blood pressure. They drew blood and did tests. I stared at the walls. After three days it was the longest I’d gone without any drugs or alcohol in seven years. After four days it was the longest in nine years.

My memory annihilated the watery unreal days between me and the drugs. The color of the hospital reminded me of new dope. Outside the window I could see a pale winter light that reminded me of getting high in the winter.

They cut off the withdrawal medicine. They left my nerves exposed in the low-thread-count sheets. They gave me pamphlets and books to read. They showed me videos to educate me on the severity of my disease. Scientific videos. They showed me a video of a junkie watching a video of a junkie shooting dope. In the video, people in white coats compared the brain scan of the junkie shooting dope with the brain scan of the junkie watching. The brain scans looked the same.

“The question is not just ‘why can’t they stop once they start?’” the voiceover intoned. “The more difficult question is ‘why do they always start again once they have stopped?’”

Sometimes the two secret words of the fever movie in my parents’ hotel room became the two words of my name. And I met an English guy named Peter in the smoking lounge of the ward. He was the personal chef of a Mexican billionaire. He was a crack-head. I met an alcoholic car salesman named Rodney. I met a thick southern guy about my age named Al. He was a coke dealer who went from snorting to smoking. His drug-dealer bosses had sent him to the treatment center to get him back to snorting. When he smoked he made mistakes. We were all wearing baggy blue hospital clothes. You had to look at our faces to tell us apart. We looked at our shoes.

A week after I’d arrived, they finally moved me from the hospital ward to a unit in the regular part of the treatment center. The unit I was assigned to held about twenty guys. It was divided into a number of rooms, which held between two and four beds each, and a large central area with a television, a large poster of the Twelve Steps, and a coffee pot.

They sent one of the inmates, Marty, to come pick me up from the hospital ward and take me to my room. He was a senior patient. Most patients stayed at the treatment center for four weeks. I’d already been there for one week. The patients who had been there three weeks were the seniors. They walked and talked differently. You could easily pick one out in a crowd. The seniors were entrusted with picking up the newcomers from the hospital ward. It fostered a spirit of camaraderie and provided an opportunity for the newcomers and seniors to mingle.

“This is a great treatment center,” Marty said. “Last month I was at one in Atlanta that really sucked. There was hardly any focus on the Third Step. That’s the crucial step. I was here last year around this time. They do a wonderful job with the Third Step here. I don’t know how great a job they do with the Second Step.” He frowned. Then he smiled.

“Everything is going to be fine.”

I had never seen the Twelve Steps before and when I saw the huge poster of them covering an entire wall on the unit I had a little panic attack.

“Does this mean I can’t even have a drink again?” I whispered to Al, who came up to greet me as Marty walked off.