White Out (34 page)

In my basement room, with the lights off, a corner of my desk glowed under the dayghost’s white eye. I sweated. I saw everything clearly. When you’re a person, everything reminds you of something else. When I panic, as I panicked realizing no I can’t no I’m unable even to do the simplest job I’m not made for this world, unmade for this kind of world—when I panic the memory webs burn off the things. Every veil, every mood, every memory flashes and smokes off them. This desk is this desk. The wall looks like the wall. The dayghost is white; the carpet is pink.

My panicked eyes darted around the room. The things made me panic more. I panicked at the inhuman way things look when I’m panicked. They look different. The things look as they must look to themselves. When they’re alone. The desk looks the way the wall sees it. The things outside of memory. They’re scared. The wall is solid shock. The desk frozen in minus ten thousand degrees of panic. The chair panicked, freaking, bent over twisted and hiding in the shape of a chair. This world is not safe.

I tried pulling myself together but when I closed my eyes or when I opened them now—in addition to my desk the dayghost the chair the carpet me and no memory—there was one other thing in the room. A thing that wasn’t there.

“Pull yourself together. This is just a panic attack; you’ve had them before,” I told myself.

But dope was in the room for sure now. When I pulled myself together I pulled myself together around the ghost of a white vial of dope.

“Pull yourself together!”

It was like trying to breathe with a hole in your lungs.

“Relax!”

I was pacing. The room was too small to pace in. I didn’t have any Valium. The room was too small to breathe in. It was sucked in and breathless. I grabbed the pillow off my bed and placed it on the ground. Then I sat cross-legged on it. Hands clasped at my navel, palms down, thumbs barely touching. Like the picture of the Buddha on my book about meditating.

I sat cross-legged on the cushion. I threw my panicked gaze on the carpet three feet in front of me. My look was as sharp as a piece of broken glass. Every knot in the carpet stood out, looking the way carpet-knots look to themselves. Alien, amnesiac knots of carpet. Unrelaxing vision.

I counted my breaths. Tried to breathe through my nose. Counted the exhalations. I knew from the meditation book exhalations are longer than inhalations when one is properly relaxed. I was improperly panicked.
Relapse
, I thought. One, I counted. Two, I counted.
Relapse, relapse.
Three, I counted.
Relapse, relapse, relapse.
Four, I counted.
Money
, I thought. Seven, I counted.
Homelessness. Friendlessness.

Seven, I counted again. Eight.
These breaths are coming too fast
, I thought. I tried to breathe through my nose. Try to breathe through your nose when you’re panting. Your head gets kind of sucked in on itself and you wheeze. Breathe. The white thing appeared on the carpet. A white vial towering over the carpet. Like a negative of the black monolith from
2001.
Blink. Pink carpet.
It is negative
, I thought.
Count your breaths, idiot
, I thought. One, I counted. Two, I counted.

This is terrible
, I thought. Three, I counted. Every breath was like swallowing a huge pill with no water. A horse pill. One after the other after the other. Pills full of black space. Four. Five. Six. A big bottle, get them all down. Seven, I counted. I had to open my mouth wide to get it around the next one. Seven, I counted again. I tried to breathe through my nose.

Just before the thoughts stopped I felt unbearably constricted. Bursting full of the horse-pill breaths. A quarter hour of sitting on an uncomfortable cushion swallowing breaths and counting them with half-open eyes. I lost perspective.

Part of my face moved under my vision where the breaths came and went. I couldn’t tell how big my face was. It might have been three inches wide. Or thirty feet. I might have been a man or a woman. I was breathing from everywhere like a sponge. I couldn’t see enough to see. No space to see my seeing from. Just the tiny square of carpet before me. All I could hear was my breathing. My mind at six thousand revs per second. Spinning in my body like a wheel in sand. Three, I counted. Four, I counted. Five. Six.

Then it stopped and the numbers went forward alone. Seven. Eight. Nine.

There was space inside the numbers. Pills with outer space inside and a little outer-space coating and I swallowed them easily. One. Two. Three. Four. There was space in the way the carpet looked. The way the carpet looked to the carpet. My gaze fell on the carpet. Inside my looking two knots of carpet looked at each other. There was plenty of space in the way they looked. Outer space. Endless space.

There was space in my thoughts too, which were now also floating in space.

What about my job?
I thought.

Space between me and the thought, and space between me and the thinker of the thought. Space between me and the thinker of the thinker. Who am I?

Cash once told me I like meditating because it’s like getting high. I got angry when he said it. Meditating is nothing like getting high, I told him. It takes effort, for one thing. When you’re panicking, for example. It’s often boring, for another. You have to force yourself to do it, most of the time. And it doesn’t get you high.

But I was wrong and he was right. Meditating is like getting high. But not for the reason Cash thought. Not because meditation and heroin give me the same feeling in my head. But because they show me the same thing in the world. The thing I like to see. The hole. Dope and meditation are totally different, but they show me the same thing because it’s there to be seen. Because the world really is the way I want it. This world really is the way I desperately long for it to be.

Time is as insubstantial as smoke.

Cash is as insubstantial as smoke. I spent a lot of time with him in those days. Dave called two weeks ago and told me Cash’s back drinking Robitussin. I won’t talk to him since he kind of threatened to shoot me in California, but like anyone I’m curious about what he’s discovering. I think it likely that no one in America has drunk as much Robitussin as he has. I know America is a big place.

“He calls it metaphilosophy,” Dave said, speaking of Cash’s robo-thinking. He then read me some of Cash’s latest emails.

“Perspective is based on the number one. Logic is based on two, and communication and relationships within and between beings are based on three. This is also the solution to Clarke’s solution in
Rendezvous with Rama
…”

“…I also believe that everything was destined to work precisely the way it has by the prime mover. Using Wikipedia I can easily tie together all historical events, many of them religious, in order to show the progression…”

“…Additionally, the unraveling all started with Zoroaster…”

“The degree of madness is impressive,” Dave commented.

I asked him to keep forwarding them to me, and I’d reflect on the new one each morning at breakfast. A tone of sublime compassion inflected the final emails. The subject line of the very last one read “Who will laugh.” Here is the full text:

“Who will laugh at kindness, love, and good sense?”

I won’t. Ten years ago, in the months after I got out of rehab, I was a disciple of Cash’s kindness, love, and good sense. Every day I went to an NA meeting and then drove over to Cash’s apartment. We talked for hours. He’d quit drinking a couple years earlier and was glad to show me around his sober lifestyle.

We talked about proper eating habits, quitting smoking, exercise. Cash showed me how to do a concentration curl, and explained what tendonitis is. He explained why it’s not good to exercise too much. He explained that good things are only good if they last. An exercise, for example, is good only if you can do it in such a way that you can keep doing it for the rest of your life. He demonstrated, curling the forty-five-pound dumbbell slowly up.

“Twelve reps,” he said through gritted teeth. “Three sets. Three days a week.”

He didn’t tell me everything. I noticed that his shoes were always lined up in a peculiar way. The pairs of shoes made a kind of lightning-bolt shape. One time I accidently kicked a pair over on my way to the bathroom. He didn’t say anything, but when I got out of the bathroom they were lined up again.

The spring turned into summer. Cash lived downtown, west of the Loop. There were people around during the day, but it got kind of deserted at night. It was an area in transition. The old projects had been torn down but the new condo buildings hadn’t gone up yet. When we walked the streets near his apartment talking about exercise and movies, there were maybe four or five other people around. A pretty girl jogging, two homeless men, and us. Everyone smiled at each other.

Sometimes the sun would set when we were walking. Cash, two homeless men, me, a girl jogging. We all smiled at each other. I smiled at them like I knew what it was like, and they smiled back the same at me. It was the middle of the summer in an empty corner of the city. A place outside the world. In that place, where no one gets out, it was safe to change places with anyone.

For example, during the days Cash and I would sometimes play tennis. We’d shout little jokes back and forth as we played, and after a while we’d fall silent, leaping and lunging around the court. I’d pretend to be a famous tennis player, a genius who’d perfected a single shot. I’d give interviews in my head as I watched the ball come and go. Sometimes I’d also reflect on how kind I was—what a great tennis player, so kind to children, so fond of animals. Which was odd because kindness was never ordinarily a quality I’d dwell on in my fantasies about myself. That’s when I knew my thoughts had gotten mixed up with Cash’s. He lunged after the ball on the other side of the net.

Afterward we’d eat barbeque. Some days we’d eat Thai. One day Cash said it was a good thing that my parents were letting me stay at their house for the summer and that I didn’t have to get a job for a while. He said he thought I’d commit suicide if I had to get a job.

I disagreed. I felt that now that I was clean I could handle anything. But I remembered how time felt on that job site. Job time. I remembered it in my bones. The reason I was going back to grad school was so that I wouldn’t have to do manual labor, I told him. He said he thought that was a good idea. Even though he didn’t like reading and writing so much—in fact he despised intellectuals as cowards—he thought on balance it was a good idea, and planned to apply to grad school himself in the fall.

We went to lots of movies. One was about a castle and a village troubled by dragon attacks. You see movies like that on the shelves at the video store and think they never came out in theaters. But they did, and we saw them. Another movie was about an executive who was dying. The final scene in the hospital was nearly whited out with bright light coming in from the windows. We left strangely exalted. Another movie was about code breakers in World War II. Another was about gangsters.

While we were waiting for the film about dragons to start I heard a wonderfully happy song. The singer’s voice was heavily processed and there were only four words in it: “Since I Left You,” over and over, beautifully. The thing I like best about songs is when the voice is electronically processed. A computer that makes the voice go much higher than is possible in life, for example. “Since I Left You.” The voice stands on the human being as on a diving board. Just the tips of its toes, and it’s gone…

I bought the CD and played “Since I Left You” when I exercised. I imagined it was about drugs. I imagined it was about Cat. About Eva. About Funboy. About Dom. I’d put on my headphones, put the CD on shuffle, and run on the treadmill just waiting for the one song. Sometimes it would come on around the three-mile mark, when the initial tiredness in my legs had burned off and my chest was burning and I’d smile with my face breaking. Every day I’d smile once like that. Those smiles would come into the world wet with the sweat on my face. New, enormous, shapeless. Going everywhere, like babies.

Afterward I’d walk outside on the grass talking with my sponsor on the phone maybe or talking with my little half brother. My first clean summer. It’s strange; those days don’t stick in memory very well. And all the days that come after hardly stick at all. The bits in this book that take place after I got clean—like the part about moving to Florida, for example—were written right after the event. Otherwise I’m not so sure I’d remember them. In the summer of 2002, the river of my memory was emptying into a delta. I walked around with it falling all around me, falling through the sunshine. When it got dark, Cash and I went for a walk or went to see movies.

Once he said it was too bad he was a convicted felon because it would be nice to own a gun. He felt bad because there were some things in life that weren’t worth going through, and if you didn’t have a gun you’d probably end up having to go through them. Like what, I asked him. Like diarrhea, he said. Like chronic, constant diarrhea. The kind where you have terrible cramps and moan out loud, the food-poisoning kind. It just wouldn’t be worth it to him, he said. It was just plain old-fashioned good sense, he said, to have a gun.