War of the Encyclopaedists (36 page)

WAKING IN THE BLUE

46

A flurry of snow swept across the windowpanes on the tenth floor, whiting the outside world—the Charles River disappeared. After a moment, the wind subsided and Corderoy could see it again in the distance, wending through Boston. It had frozen over sometime in January and was still covered in a sheet of ice.

He'd told Mani he was at school. Why he had lied was complicated. There was Mani's ongoing lie to her parents, which Corderoy took as a moral context to excuse his own lies. There was his fear that if Mani knew he had dropped out of BU, she'd see him as a pitiful mooch, and he desperately wanted her to see him as a person going places. Then there was the fact that Mani had to paint, he wanted her to paint, and she needed space, which meant he had to leave the house. He had to go somewhere. And so he had come here, to Massachusetts General Hospital, to do some cocaine.

Corderoy had saved up what he considered a fair chunk of money in Seattle, but most of that had gone to paying rent to Tricia over the last five months. He couldn't depend on his parents anymore, and he couldn't take out loans because he hadn't registered for classes. Mani was already graciously giving him shelter. At the least, he felt obligated to buy food and booze for the two of them. He'd briefly considered getting an actual job, teaching ESL or tutoring for the SAT, but he didn't want to reprise his life in Seattle. Initially, he'd gone to the blood bank. Montauk had always said,
There are only two ways to be more drunk: drink more
alcohol, or have less blood
. Unfortunately for Corderoy, this principle led inevitably to the direct transformation of fifty dollars' worth of blood to fifty dollars' worth of booze. Thus, he had responded eagerly to an ad for a medical study paying six hundred dollars and requiring only a small amount of his time, provided he had previously used cocaine. And now here he was, on the tenth floor of MGH, reading an anthology of confessional poetry, waiting to meet a Dr. Hernandez.

Though he hadn't enrolled for the spring semester, he had bought a few books that were on the syllabi for classes he might have taken. It helped keep up the illusion, for himself, that his current situation was temporary, that he'd catch right back up when he figured things out. It also allowed him to more effectively lie to Mani.

He read a few lines of Robert Lowell's “Waking in the Blue.”

Absence! My heart grows tense

as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

He looked away and tried to remember what was next. He'd memorized that poem for a class some years back but could remember only scraps of it.

Dr. Hernandez opened the door and introduced herself as Antonia. “There's a dressing gown behind the door,” she said, handing him a clipboard. “I'll be back.”

Corderoy changed into the paper gown and sat down with the questionnaire. It focused mostly on his past drug use. One of the questions asked if he'd ever used crack cocaine. He was pretty sure the answer was no
.
About a year ago, he and Montauk had been out drinking on Capitol Hill and had gone down to Broadway to buy some coke. They'd dropped fifty bucks and walked away with a bag of something white. When they'd examined it back at the Encyclopad, it wasn't powder, as they'd expected, but hard crystals. They'd had difficulty cutting it up enough to snort it. So they'd called up Johnny, their resident drug expert.

“Sounds like you bought crack,” Johnny said. The question then was, “How do we smoke it?” Following Johnny's instructions, they cut
the metal nub off of a lightbulb with a bread knife, extracted the filament, and shook salt around inside to remove the white coating.

They rotated the bulb slowly over a lighter while the crystals inside began to melt and give off vapor trails that they inhaled through a straw they'd made from a Bic pen. Their mouths numbed and they felt light-headed. According to Johnny, it should have hit them with more intensity and less duration than coke. This was more akin to licking the bag at the end of the night. Or leaving the dentist.

Was it crack? Corderoy figured it was just the shittiest coke he'd ever bought. It got them high, that was true. But it didn't smoke like it was supposed to. And having tried to smoke crack or been willing to smoke crack wasn't the same as actually having smoked it. He checked the box for
no,
then quickly finished the rest of the forms.

A nurse arrived and escorted Corderoy to the MRI room, where Dr. Hernandez was waiting. They laid him down on the extended bed and put an IV in his arm.

“We'll be injecting you with intravenous cocaine,” Dr. Hernandez said. “Then we'll slide you into the MRI and ask you questions while we capture images of your brain. When you're done, we'll give you some food and you'll stay here until the cocaine is out of your system. Then you're free to go. Ready?” She held up a large syringe.

“What percent solution is it?” Corderoy asked.

“Sorry?”

“Sherlock Holmes injected himself with a seven percent solution of cocaine. There was a story about it. Just curious.”

Dr. Hernandez began injecting the cocaine. “I'm not sure,” she said, looking at Corderoy as if he were an addict who might break into the hospital later that night.

The cocaine surged up his arm, hit his heart, and sent it into a drumroll, building to a fearsome cymbal crash, then took the off-ramp and hit the expressway aorta to his brain—the windows of the house were flung open and spring drafts leapt in and swept out the stale aromas of private consciousness.

The doctor hit a button, and the bed slowly brought Corderoy into the maw of the MRI like the tongue of a huge beast, languid and sure of its catch. He became aware of the inside of the tube, the seams in
the metal, the guard strapped over his head. The cocaine had hit him hard, and he was clenching his jaw several times a second, about every fourth beat of his heart.

“All right, Mr. Corderoy. Can you rate your intoxication level on a scale from one to ten? Ten being the most intoxicated you've ever felt and one being the least.”

“I don't feel intoxicated,” Corderoy said. “I feel sober. More than sober.” He remembered the first time he'd tried cocaine—he'd been seven beers deep at five in the afternoon, and he could suddenly converse, walk, and drive with a miraculous sobriety.

“Just choose a number.”

“Can it be negative?”

“No.”

“Fine, then. Zero.” Corderoy thought he heard Dr. Hernandez sigh, but it was hard to hear above the pulsing of his blood in his ears—or was that the MRI spinning around him—did it spin?

“And how euphoric do you feel?”

“Twelve. Just kidding. Ten.”

“Your desire for more?”

“Ten.”

After a few more questions, she told him to lie still while the MRI finished its work. He was twitching his leg and arm muscles, grinding his teeth, trying to channel all his nervous energy away from the top of his head, where the giant magnet was focused, focused not on his head but on his brain, which he now realized was a meat computer.

Lie still. Lie still. What kind of craziness was that? This is cocaine. No weed, Quaaludes, mushrooms, no whoa trippy man, no sit on the couch with a beer and watch the game alcohol bullshit I need to do something. Fuck on coke. Skydive on coke. Say hello to my little friend and go out with a grenade launcher on coke. Flex your toes. This is the house of the mentally ill. Absence. That was backward. Go in for the kill. Lowell. Fuck confessional Lowell. Pound. There was a mother­fucker who probably did some coke. This is the house of bedlam. The man that lies in the house. What was the line? This is a Jew in a newspaper hat. Hated Jews, Pound. How long has it been? Went to the madhouse. The boy that pats the floor to see if the world is there, is
flat . . . creaking sea of board . . . dances weeping. That wasn't Pound. It was Bishop, about Pound. Some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts. That was Plath. How long has it been? Some god got hold of me. Stop whispering. Hold still. Blue volts like a desert prophet. And then? And then? The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid. But what about Pound. These thoroughbred mental cases. Lowell again. Fucking Lowell will not leave. Twice my age and half my weight. All old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor. Yes. Fuck. How long has it been? Flex your toes, hands, toes, hands. Who puts a man on coke, says be a statue. Count to twenty. Again. Number four, I know you heard this before: never get high on your own supply. Stop grinning, grinding. Not my supply. Where do you get coke this good? Ten months in this gut, what the fuck. I wish Moms'd hurry up. Biggie. Yes yes. Umbilical cord's wrapped around my neck, I'm seeing my death and I ain't even took my first step. Breathe, breathe. The MRI is whirring down, whirring worrying to silence out, out into the open, praise be to the open.

• • •

By the time he'd returned to the exam room and changed back into his clothes, the edge of the cocaine had worn off. He was still clenching his jaw every thirty seconds, and his heart rate was above normal, but he was no longer thinking in double time. They'd given him a sandwich.

When Dr. Hernandez came in twenty minutes later, she handed him a CD. “Thought you might like to have this,” she said. “FMRI images of succeeding slices of your brain.”

“My brain on drugs,” Corderoy said.

“That's right.”

“When is my next appointment?”

Dr. Hernandez gave an inaudible sigh. “Dr. Bradley and I have to discuss the results of this visit before we schedule another. You'll hear from us in the next week or so.”

Outside, he walked toward the T. Would they call him back? He'd fucked up, being so difficult with their questions. And why did he have to ask about Holmes and the Seven-Per-Cent solution? A damn fool thing to do. No, they weren't going to call him back. Which meant he'd
have to find something else to do each day, when Mani thought he was hard at work, earning his degree.

When Corderoy walked in the door, Mani was holding a small brush and worrying the curling loop of a palm frond in the corner of a painting. “How was class?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Good. Good. Plath, you know.” He wanted to sound excited, but the comedown had hit him so hard that the world felt muted. He slumped down onto her mattress. “Take a break,” he said.

Mani turned and set her brush down. “Chinese food?” She wiped her hands on her paint-splattered jeans and leaned dangerously close over Corderoy to reach for her phone on the windowsill.

They ate their kung pao chicken and vegetable moo shu sitting up in Mani's bed, watching old episodes of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
on her laptop. This was more or less what they'd done for the past week, although it wasn't always Chinese food, and it wasn't always
Buffy
. It was always three to five beers, maybe some whiskey, and then a shoulder rub—but that was all. This time, though, after working the knots out of Mani's neck, Corderoy ventured a hand onto her upper thigh; he kissed her behind the ear.

It took all of two minutes for them to get completely naked.

Mani had climbed on top of him, but she pulled back and said, “Do you have a condom?”

Corderoy shook his head.

She slumped, but her weight was still pressed against his erect penis. “We shouldn't, right?” she said.

“Yeah,” Corderoy said. “We shouldn't.”

So they did. Mani came with controlled violence, curling her pelvis into him like she was sanding a piece of wood, and as she breathed against his neck, Corderoy lost control, pulled out abruptly, and ejaculated on his stomach.

She lay back on the mattress next to him, breathing fast. Corderoy stared at the peeling paint on the studio ceiling, his chest rising rapidly in time with hers, his hand resting again on her upper thigh.

“You pulled out in time, right?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“You think—”

“Yes, I did. We're fine.”

“You know,” Mani said, “this doesn't—”

“I know,” Corderoy said. “You want to sleep head to toe again?”

“Shut up,” Mani said. And they went to sleep naked, spooning for warmth in the drafty airspace of her loft.