White Out (18 page)

These questions led to another: When had I last paid my bills? I couldn’t remember. OK, try to remember what I’d been doing the last day I paid my bills. I couldn’t. I tried to remember writing out a check, putting a stamp on an envelope. I concentrated. I saw my pen move across the check; I saw myself licking the stamp. It felt like I was making it up. That wasn’t a good sign.

When I got off the elevator at the sixth floor, there was a smell in the hallway. At first I thought it was just me. I was high, after all. I ducked back in the elevator, went up a few floors, came back down, and got out again.

The smell was still there. It was pretty strong right outside my door. It wasn’t really a good smell, but it didn’t smell like chemicals, either. Not gas. I couldn’t identify it. Not smoke.
Why fool yourself?
I thought. It smelled like shit. I opened the door.

The smell was abominable. That was the word that came to mind. It wasn’t a word I typically used. The smell used it; it was the smell’s word.

There were clouds of tiny flies in the apartment. It was probably a hundred degrees in there. I flicked the light switch. Nothing. The power had been cut off. In my dark mailbox the bills had been warning each other about this for weeks. Now it had happened.

There was a green beer bottle sitting on the floor with five cigarette butts floating in three inches of liquid. Normally one would have smelled that. But it had no smell. Its smell was just erased by the foulness coming in waves from the kitchen. The odorless beer bottle was unreal, just a picture. Like something in a movie.

I walked forward into the apartment and turned straight into the smell. It was hot death. It was obscene, perverted. Full of lies. The smell pulsed and pumped out of the refrigerator. I stared, stunned and frightened, at the white refrigerator, sagging on the filthy floor. In one hundred degrees of heat. Its metal edges went soft and flabby in the heat waves. The evil smell gave it a life. It was alive. I stood there for a while, the dope heavy in my calves and feet. I was afraid to open it and look inside. It had changed.

I stared at it, transfixed. The color white can also mean heat. Intense heat. White heat. The fridge was like a square white sun. The blinds were all closed, and the horrible ten-day-old heat of the apartment bent the light. Look at the fridge. Tiny flies poured from an opening in its back. Look at it. The indent between freezer and refrigerator looked like a thin-lipped white mouth. Unsmiling.

And the abominable smell went right through me. My nose belonged to it. My nose was full of its fly life. I was gone. The smell smelled itself in me.

Stop. I pulled myself together and opened the refrigerator door. A half jar of mayo, four bottles of beer, and a two-pound package of ground beef. Scott and I had opened it to make hamburgers, but then the dope came on and we didn’t feel like eating. Now the dead meat was alive with maggots. People used to think maggots spontaneously generated in meat. They’d leave meat in a tightly closed cupboard and open it a week later and it would be crawling with flies. They couldn’t understand how the flies had gotten in. They believed it was magic.

I don’t remember how this phenomenon was eventually explained, but I felt an ancient feeling when I stared at that two-pound black-and-purple fly womb. I didn’t feel too objective. I didn’t see this as what happens to meat left in a fridge in an apartment where the power has been shut off during a heat wave.

Looking at the living fly meat, I believed in a devil. I was like a child learning a new lesson. The meat had been dead. But that was a trick. Death is just a thin shell around more life. Worse life. Death is alive. There is no difference between death and life. I shut the door and the fridge’s white face stared back at me, flies rising from its head like fast thoughts.

CHAPTER 9

T
hrough no fault of my own, my apartment had become infested by maggots. Workers with gloves and masks had to come and take the fridge away. The company that managed the apartment was pretty angry. There had been complaints about the smell. The fridge had to be replaced. They only calmed down when they found out I had nothing to do with it. I carefully explained how the whole mess was my subletter’s sole responsibility. My subletter’s crime. I’d sublet my apartment to an irresponsible person for the last month. Why beat around the bush? He was an animal. One of the maintenance people had seen him a number of times over the summer. Entering and leaving the apartment, in the company of vicious scumbags. He was tall, thin, and pale, with dark hair and blue eyes.

Yes, well, he looked like me. There’s no denying it. We always feel that people who look like us on the outside will be like us on the inside. We feel we can trust them. That’s where racism comes from. Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never trust anyone who looks like me again. He didn’t leave any forwarding address, he just cleared out. He still owes me rent money. If you see him, let me know. We’re all his victims.

The undead meat smell lingered after the fridge was removed. “It smells like your mom’s been in here,” Funboy remarked. But a little time removes all smells, the smell of death, the smell of birth. A little time, applied to the stain, removes the stain, then removes what was stained. More slowly. By the time this smell had gone, I’d learned how to kill time for good.

By late October, time still ate away at the bricks and boards of my apartment, but it stopped when it got to me. Time stopped at the lenses of my eyes, at my eardrums, my toes, and my fingertips. With all my bad math and sick memory, I’d finally fucked up and done dope three days in a row. Now I could feel weeks and months and years collapsing inside me, turning to white dust.

I felt like laughing. I wished I’d done it three days in a row before. October 1999 to April 2000. The museum of pleasures. It’s time to think a little about the pleasures of addiction.

In October 1999, I realized what I’d been doing. I’d cast a spell on the world. The spell worked. White tops. Time killers. It’s a wizard pleasure. It lasted for roughly six months of calendar time.

The museum of white pleasure. I still have it. It sits on my desk as I write, like one of those glass globes. When you shake it, white dust covers the little house and people. I’m there. Funboy, Todd, Nancy, and Andy are waving. Six months, curved like a globe. The needle that pierces it from the north, will emerge in the west. Emerge changed. White power. Those whom I love, time shall not touch. It’s like a poem. No weapon raised against me shall prosper. It’s like a prayer.

Pleasure, ancient spinal animal pleasure, comes from gaining control or losing control. Losing control and gaining control. The pleasure that began for me in October 1999 was the pleasure of gaining control. The first power granted me was the control over spirits, over numbers, over the words and thoughts of the dead. I discovered it late one night, sitting on my ratty couch reading
Walden.
I was wondering what I’d gone to grad school for. I was supposed to be learning how to think in Baltimore. History, literature, philosophy.

I was reading
Walden.
An assignment from a seminar I was taking. I’d just gotten back from a dope run with Funboy, and as the white dope wheel turned inside me, the words from the book dropped through the spokes.

The words lost their old familiar shapes in the turning dope wheel. The most naked clichés, shapes as dull and public as a post office—“Each man steps to the beat of a different drummer,” “Wealth is the ability to fully experience life”—I saw them melt and run. Everything was melting and running, and my new dope thinking had a place for everything. I saw myself writing a new history of the nineteenth century. Of the twentieth century. The twenty-first. Close up, my new history was grooved and tunneled like a beehive. It had slots for every melting sentence from the past and future. From a distance it looked like a star.

In the timeless space of dope I discovered that time is the great enemy of thought. Trapped in time, a thought is shapeless. Its far end is hidden in an unknown past; its near end is lost in an unknown future. The business of the thinker is with the part that passes overhead. The conduits, the wire or metallic hollows going from there to there. Skulls, gold, bubbles, names, and viruses fill the chambers, empty the past of everything solid and carry it all to be reassembled in the future. The present is crisscrossed with tubes and wires. Put your hand on any present object—this wooden desk,
Walden
, a ten-dollar bill—and the hum of the traffic of solids, liquids, numbers, and words vibrates under your fingertips.

Time means that every solid shape is in motion. The teacup I hold in my hand is a bullet shot out of a gun. It’s no wonder that it’s so impossibly hard to think in these conditions. It’s no wonder that maggots grow in fresh meat, that an electric bill is overdue as soon as you open it, that the first time you try something you’re already addicted.

But all that was over now. The timeless space of dope was like a magic picture frame. In it, the shapes of thoughts, sentences, and phenomena grew solid outlines, stood still, and let me copy them down in my essays. My stalled graduate student career took off. I found my star shape in every volume in the archives. I couldn’t read enough. My professors took notice.

“You have an interesting mind,” they said. “Send this to the editor of this journal.” The editors liked it too. I wondered if they did dope themselves. I became certain of it. I imagined myself at the age of the oldest, sitting in my spacious office, the walls lined with my books, and a crystal bowl of raw dope on my desk. Funboy’s portrait over the doorway.

October, November, December, January. Isn’t it nice to sit down with a good book and take the phone off the hook while a fire burns in the fireplace? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if the fire was burning the future and the past, and now nothing could ever touch you?

I’d always wanted a place outside the world. Candy Land with glass fields and sidewalks, so you could rest your head on your hands and gaze dreamily down through the clouds at the world below. I was building Candy Land. Each book in the piles around my couch was a square of glass pavement.

The tall windows of my apartment looked out over cold streets in November. With the chill, and the end of time, a new elegance had taken hold everywhere. Nothing would grow again, but that was fine; there was so much to catalog and reshape and light up, even a thousand years wouldn’t be enough. I had a thousand years. Just then my friend Todd showed up at my door. He wanted to talk. I put on the teakettle.

“I feel as if the next frontier for the theory of sexuality is bestiality,” Todd said. He was writing an article on the history of sexuality. I laughed.

“No, I’m serious, Mike,” he was smiling. “You know, when you’ve got a little dog, and you want him to come in for the night, and you put a little dish of water at the back door, and he comes in? What is that?”

“Bestiality,” I said.

“How about when you’ve got a little white horse, and you set him down on the counter, he’s pawing at the tiles, and you bend down, and you let him run up into your nose?”

“Bestiality,” I said, bending down and sniffing a line of horse off the counter. “But what does it have to do with sex?”

“Losing control,” he said. “Every kind of losing control is sexual. Plus everything about animals is sexy.”

“Why losing control?” I asked, ignoring the part about sexy animals. “Dogs and horses are tame animals. Isn’t that gaining control? Both of those examples are examples of mastery.”

“No, they’re not,” he said quickly. “All you do is let the animals in. You open your home, your nose, to the animal, and then the animal is free inside you. The dog slinks around the china, sniffs the glasses on the dinner table.”

“But you let the dog in because the dog is tame.”

“Being tame means that when you tell an animal to run inside your house, the animal runs in.”

“OK, but all this is pretty abstract. Bestiality is just when people get turned on by animals.”

“That’s an oversimplification. Bestiality is not necessarily about being attracted to the animal’s body. Not at first. First you let the animal in. The idea of the animal gets loose in you. It makes new openings. The animal trots and nuzzles and bites and makes new sensitive spaces. At night, when you’re sleeping or watching TV, the animal rewrites your body from the inside out.” He paused, lighting a cigarette.

“You wake up one day and your body is covered with paw-shaped holes, horn-shaped holes, hoof-shaped holes. Each one is red and sensitive and horny. The animal has made you animal-ready. It’s a process, like falling in love.”

What could I say to that?

Todd was smart and rich and handsome, in a kind of androgynous way. Blond, blue eyes, slim, medium height. Every grad school had wanted him. When he’d visited Johns Hopkins, an important professor from Chicago had given a lecture. A bunch of the professors had asked questions, trying to trip her up. Todd had calmly raised his hand and asked a question that she said “opened new vistas.”

Whatever. But he was super-smart, and I felt like I needed new friends like him. Blond, blue, androgynous. Blue-white skin when he was high. Then he looked like a tall JonBenét Ramsey. And he talked about bestiality. The third point of the new triangle was a real girl, which kept everything in perspective. Her name was Nancy.

She was smart and lovely, with dark hair and fair skin. Well-dressed. Her parents had raised her as if they’d been richer than they were. Phantom mansions and Bentleys shone in her gestures. She wasn’t above a little dope, either.

That fall, she and Todd and I were often together. We’d stage elaborate dope-doing times, with candles and music, and me pretending that I only did it on those occasions. It was easy to pretend. Ice was growing in my veins. Any discrepancies would disappear down the white holes of our weekends. Of course there were some awkward moments. But on the whole I was happy. I spent the white nights writing and reading, the soft white afternoons drinking tea with Todd, or Todd and Nancy.