“Come on, push, you bag of bones,” Kyle says, and Earl lowers his head and puts his shoulder to the desk, offering up all of the little strength he has left.
Purpose
I
'm lying on a sheetless mattress in my room, watching a moth bludgeon itself on my naked light bulb. Over near the window sits a small television I never watch, beside it a hot plate I never use. I spend most of my time here, thinking about rock cocaine, not thinking about rock cocaine, performing rudimentary experiments, smoking rolled tobacco rescued from public ashtrays, trying to remember what my mind used to feel like, and, of course, studying my science book. I dumpstered it two years ago and ever since it has been beside my mattress like a friend at a slumber party, pretending to sleep, dying for consultation. I read it for at least two hours every day; I know this because I time myself. It's a grade-ten textbook, a newer edition, complete with glossy diagrams and photos of famous scientists who all look so regal and determined, it's as though the flashbulb had caught them at the very moment their thoughts were shifting
the scientific paradigm forever. I like to think that when they gazed pensively up at the stars and pondered the fate of future generations, they were actually thinking of me.
I excavated the book in June. The kid who threw it out thought he would never have to see science again, that September would never come. What an idiotâI used to believe that.
My room is about the size of a jail cell. One time, two guys came through my open window and beat me with a pipe until I could no longer flinch and stole my former TV and a can of butts, so I hired a professional security company called Apex to install bars on my window. I spent my entire welfare cheque on them, just sat and safely starved for a whole month. I had to pay the guy cash up front because he didn't believe I could possibly have that kind of money. It felt good to pay him that kind of money, he did a good job.
Someone is yelling at someone outside, so I go to the window and look out into Oppenheimer Park, which is across the street from my rooming house. There I see only a man calmly sitting on a bench, smoking. Everyone says this park was named after the scientist who invented the nuclear bomb. It has playground equipment, but it's always empty because no parent would ever bring their kid there, on account of it being normally frequented by people who are like me or Steve or worse. The park is infamous, an open-air drug market, they say. From my window, I've seen people get stabbed there, but not all the time, good things happen in the park too. Some people lie in the grass all day and read. The people who are reading don't get stabbed. I'm not sure why that is.
I'm finished studying, so I go out and cut across the northeast corner of the park, walking west up Powell. I approach a group of about six Vietnamese men. You can always tell the drug dealers because they are the ones with bikes. I purchase a ten rock with a ten-dollar bill, all of my money until Wednesday. Eye contact somehow seems to make things more illegal, so I stare at the ground while one of them barks at me. He is cartoonish, his teeth brown and haphazard like tusks. He shifts side to side on his toes like a warmed-up boxer and aims nervous glances to the street. “Pipe?” he barks. “No,” I say, “I have one, thanks.”
Crack melts at a tepid eighty, and if you heat it too fast, it just burns off with minimal smoke. Smoking it is one thing I'm good at. I don't really feel the crack craving people talk about; I would describe it more as a healthy interest than anything else, like I'm fine-tuning a hypothesis, or conducting a sort of protracted experiment. I know it sounds strange, but I feel if I could get high enough one time I would quit, content with the knowledge of the actual crack high, the genuine article. Unfortunately, a paltry approximation is the only high I have been able to afford so far.
In an alley, my brain has a family reunion with some long-lost neurochemicals, and I crouch beneath the party, not wanting to disturb it, shivering and euphoric. A seemingly infinite and profound series of connections and theories swamp my mind. It is a better-than-expected stone and it makes me long for my room and my book.
A man and woman are suddenly five feet away, arguing. I am unsure how long they've been there. I have an urge to explain something complex and scientific to them, to light their eyes with wonder. The man is talking.
“Hey bro.”
“Hi, are you guys doing okay?” I sputter, feeling sweat rim my eyelids.
“Oh yeah, she's just being a harsh bitch.” The last word he turns and yells in her face, actually puffing her bangs back with it. After an emphatic pause, he turns back. “Hey bro, how about you give us a toke and make us feel better?” he says to my clutching hands with a smile and an assumed entitlement. I'm briefly embarrassed for being so absurdly high and unable to share it with them or anyone else.
I tell him, “It's all gone. Sorry,” with what I feel is a genuine sincerity, my high already beginning its diminuendo.
“How about giving me my pipe back then?” he says, steps closer.
I've been on the receiving end of this type of tactic before. I tell him sorry, there is only one, careful not to combine the words
my
and
pipe,
a pairing that would no doubt signal the commencement of my probably already inevitable beating.
The woman tells him to leave me alone. Her cropped shirt reveals an abdomen stretch-marked and harbouring unearthly wrinkles in the texture of a scrotum or an elderly elephant. The man is yelling now. Blurry and ill-advised jail tattoos populate his arms, and I watch them wave above my head. I wonder if any woman who has told her boyfriend to leave somebody alone has ever meant it. If ever, I conclude, it is a statistically insignificant proportion. Amidst his racket, the urge to smoke another rock comes over me in a bland revelation, like I need to do the dishes. I hear rats scrabbling inside the wall and I try to think if I have
ever seen a rat look up, into the sky I mean, and wonder if it is possible for them to see that far. As I'm trying to stand, the man kicks me in the chest with his fungal shoe and I feel a crunch inside my shoulder and it begins to buzz, and I bring my other arm up to shield my face.
I hear my pipe hit the ground, but it doesn't break because crack pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes. People dumpster them from medical supply laboratories. They are test tubes with no bottom, no end, all that smoke and mania just funnels through them unhindered. My lungs have tested the tubes and their acrid samples, but unfortunately there has been no control group, so the results of these experiments are often difficult to observe.
I am crumpling to the ground, hearing him pick up my pipe and smelling the tang of fermented piss. When urine evaporates it leaves a sticky yellow film, and I am thinking about how urine is a solution, not a mixture, of this I am absolutely sure and the beating continues from there.
In the room beside me lives an old junkie named Steve, who at some indeterminate point took to fixing between his toes, the rest of his veins being too thickened and prone to abscesses. He blows his welfare cheques in about three days, pupils whittled down, head pitched on the stormy sea of his neck like an Alzheimer's patient. He warns me by banging on the wall when he suspects he
may be about to shoot too much dope. I've rescued him twice by calling in the Narcan injection, plucking the needle from his foot before they arrive with their strange antidote. I guess you could say he is my only friend.
Steve knows nothing of science. Doomed to forever repeat the same experiment, he arrives on his sticky floor at the same vomit-soaked conclusion over and over. I'm well aware that experimental replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, but not to the extent Steve takes it.
In his nasal junkie voice, he calls me a tweaker or a coconut because I smoke crack, but it doesn't bother me. He doesn't mean anything bad by it. One time he sold me a kernel of soap, saying it was a rock he found on the street and he would let go for cheap. At first I didn't believe him, but it was the way he held it, with reverence, two hands together, a child holding a cricket. I didn't speak to him for weeks until he almost overdosed, and when he woke up, he'd completely forgotten ripping me off, so I forgave him, plus I stole the money back anyway. And I guess I was lonely.
Steve has been bringing me food. He says he might as well, because the guy on the other side of his room doesn't do shit when he bangs on the wall. Tins of grey meat you open with a key, and day-old hamburger buns from the gospel mission. My left collarbone is broken and my face raw and taut with swelling. Bones float and snarl in my shoulder like an aluminum boat continually running aground, and I have had dizzy spells. Last week, I stumbled to the welfare office, picked up my cheque, saw my worker, Linda #103, told her everything was okay while she made her empathy face and told me I should go to the clinic. “I should,” I said, and staggered to the cheque-cashing place,
returning home with a small fortune in Tylenol 3's and a tin of tobacco. The T-3's came from a guy I know who long ago convinced a doctor of his unbearable chronic pain, resulting in a bond I suspect is not dissimilar to love. I gave Steve some 3's for taking care of me and he took them all right away, hand to his open mouth, in a yawn.
It's a month later, I've been up for days trying to memorize the periodic table, and I'm so high my stomach is boiling. I sold the T-3's and bought some crack because I've found that it's what best alleviates the pain and the dizziness, but now the crack is all gone and the reckless similarities between magnesium and manganese are beginning to make me want to dig my teeth out of my head like weeds. I'm watching my light bulb grow brighter and grinding my molars and wishing I had someone to apologize to. I guess it's ironic that only when I'm really stoned do I feel optimistic and strong enough to never want to do it again. I'm telling myself that when I get my next cheque I'm going to get a big bag of weed and some groceries and just get healthy again.
It's morning, my room is a haze, I still haven't slept, and I'm lying face down in bed listening to the inside-my-head sound of my eyelashes crunching into the pillow that reminds me of distant steps in snow. I'm fluttering them faster and faster, imagining someone running toward me, their breath steaming into the air, and suddenly I hear my fire escape rattle.
I snap into a sitting position on the bed and there is a man at my window. He wears an old-style porkpie hat and a three-piece
tweed suit, and is smoking a tailor-made cigarette that smells American. He grips the bars of my window as if he has been momentarily locked up for a petty misunderstanding and smiles warmly.
“Hello, Henry, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
The man's speech is soft and melodic. His eyes are soothing and blue, lit by an inquisitive intensity. I recognize him from my science book.
“I recognize you from my science book,” I say, my teeth chalky and soft from grinding.
“Of course, Henry, and dare I say I recognize you as a fellow of the pursuit? Would you agree? And by âpursuit' I refer to the intrepid and arduous quest for knowledge. Care for a cigarette?” His eyes linger on my science book as I tentatively snatch a smoke through the bars, unsure which of us I would describe as being inside.
I find my hands are shaking as I light the smoke. I'm not used to tailor-mades and get panicked by the restriction of the filter as I wait for the drag in asthmatic anticipation. I exhale and begin to calm. His eyes flash as he speaks.
“I feel it's the best way for a man to buckle into some eruditionâjust a meagre room, a book, and some tobacco ⦔ He is taking strangely long drags from his cigarette, and as he exhales, his eyes scan the room and land on the vials that once held my crack supply.
“I'm sorry, Mr. Oppenheimer, butâ”
“Call me J. Robert, what my students call me.”
“I'm sorry, J. Robert, I mean thank you ⦠but I'm pretty sure there are two dates under your picture in my textbook, or rather what I mean to say is thatâ”
“I'm deceased? Throat cancer, unequivocally abhorrent, avoid it at all costs. Only truly evil things expand infinitely, my friend.” He grabs the bars and gingerly sticks his long, spindly legs through, then his arms, assuming the position I imagine would be most comfortable were one trapped in a giant birdcage. I can see his socks and they don't match.
“What're you doing here, J. Robert, if you don't mind me asking?” I mumble as he grips my eyes with his, brandishing the smile of a forgiving and benevolent parent. There is silence, he is still smiling and staring, I'm not sure if he heard me. He seems to be thinking.
He smacks his lips and lifts his palms upward and out in a gesture of peace and his long arms sweep farther into the room than I would have imagined they could. “Look, I'm not concerned with the past; I can see by the shape of your face and shoulder you are not particularly interested in revisiting it either. I'm here to elucidate, provide guidance, this sort of thing. Do you have any questions so far?”
My mind accelerates with a myriad of science-related questions, questions I've never had the chance to say out loud, and all of them seem too elementary for his finely tuned understanding. “Did you know the park out there is named after you?” I sputter, my clamping jaw carving jagged chunks out of my syllables.
“Ha. Of course it's not, Henry, it's named after Vancouver's ghastly and colitic imp of a second mayor, David Oppenheimerâno relation. Why would they name it after me?” He lights up his third cigarette in one mechanical motion and blows more smoke into my room.
“Everybody around here thinks it is,” I say. “Regardless, your question is churlish and time is precious, so moving on, I will cut to it ⦔ He clears his throat.
“In my humble opinion it is not possible to be a scientist unless you think it is of the highest value to share your knowledge. Would you agree?”