White Out (17 page)

“Where do you want to go, Funboy?” He fiddled with a lighter and looked out the window. The blue September Baltimore light isn’t good for you. Funboy throbbed in it. He didn’t know shit.

“I want to go with you,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

Well, he definitely wasn’t joking, if by “joking” you mean sarcastic or ironic or humorous. Funboy didn’t get into that. But a lot of the things he said didn’t mean anything. I looked at him. You couldn’t tell anything by looking at him. I dropped him off in Fells Point, then headed straight to the airport.

My stepmother’s sister had died, and I’d agreed to come back for the funeral. I didn’t really know her well, but she’d always been nice to me, and I could tell her niceness wasn’t a front or a fake. It was sincere. It went all the way through her, like the taste of oranges goes all the way through an orange. Even the peel.

Barb (that was her name) had been hit and killed by a drunk driver. Barb and Lori, my stepmom, had been closer than any two people I’d ever seen. War prisoners get close like that. For them it was childhood. On the plane I felt restless. I kind of thought about ordering a drink. It was before noon. My sister picked me up from the airport.

“Kind of fucked up, huh?” she said.

“Yes, well, it’s good to get out of Baltimore for a little bit. Perspective. There’s a lot of interesting people in Baltimore. My friend Funboy, for instance. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to come and visit me any time soon.”

Jenny shot me a strange look. “I meant about Barb, idiot.”

“Oh, yes. Well, these things happen. One day you’re here, the next day you’re gone. Gone but not forgotten. Can I borrow twenty dollars? I can write you a check.”

I looked out the window. “I’m probably the best graduate student in the university. I might not be the smartest, but I’m the fastest.” I moved my finger rapidly around in the air. “The thoughts go through my head so fast. Some of my fellow students, the ones that went to Harvard and Yale for undergrad and were Rhodes Scholars and all, they’re not so stupid. They’re pretty smart. They probably have more actual thoughts than I do. But my thoughts move so fast. One of my fast thoughts gets to all the same places as twenty or thirty of their slow thoughts, and it gets there faster. You can ask me something if you want.”

She didn’t feel like asking me something right then. OK, maybe later. I felt it was very important to be able to communicate with people. We pulled up at my stepmother’s parents’ white house in their deep-fifties Wonder Bread suburb. We went in the front door and Jenny offered appropriate condolences while I nodded. Lori’s father gave me a beer. He asked me how grad school was. Lots of people milled around looking dazed. My own father came up, hugged me, and told me how much it meant to him and Lori that I was able to make it.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I said. It occurred to me then that I had made a decision to be there. I remember thinking that was strange. In those days, things just seemed to happen by themselves.

I sat down in an open chair around the kitchen table. One of Lori’s uncles was telling a story. He was a grizzled white-headed guy. I’d met him when my dad and Lori had gotten married. He’d been a captain in the Navy during World War II.

“The one thing I could never stand on my ship was a homosexual,” he was saying in his firm, matter-of-fact way. “Nowadays it’s ‘cool’ to be homosexual. All the high school boys think it’s cool to act like they are homosexuals. They think it’s neat to dress and walk like they are homosexuals. Well, I assure you things were very different in 1942. It was not ‘cool.’ We had a homosexual aboard my ship in 1942. We were escorting convoys out of Iceland. At night, the homosexual was going around to the different bunks and jumping the men. One night they’d had enough, and they threw him overboard. In the morning we called roll, and he was gone.”

“Gone but not forgotten,” his wife said solemnly. Barb had been thirty-six. There were pigs in a blanket on a plate in the center of the table. Exactly the kind of detail, I thought, that someone suffering from intense sorrow would notice. The kind of thing that would burn deep into your memory. I stared at one pig in a blanket in particular. A particularly juicy one.

After waiting an appropriate amount of time, I went to the bathroom. I knew Lori’s mother had some kind of intense arthritis, and sure enough, in the medicine cabinet I found a bottle of Percocet. A bottle of now and laters. I took three for now, three for later. By the time we got to the funeral parlor they started to take effect. The effect was deeply disappointing. A very faint white light, coming from the crack under a closed door. Nothing like raw. (I like it raw.) I remembered taking Percocet before, and it had always given a really intense and satisfying buzz. Something had changed.

After a time we left in a convoy to go to the funeral parlor. I made Jenny stop at a gas station so I could get cigarettes, and then had to borrow money from her to buy them. The attendant yelled at me for lighting up next to a gas pump. When we finally walked through the door of the funeral parlor, I saw the father standing in the middle of the hallway. His powerful hands hung limply at his sides. He was crying. His solid square face was cracked and broken. Like someone had swung a baseball bat hard at the center.

“What am I going to do?” he said. “What am I going to do?”

The funeral parlor had deep brown carpeting. The walls were wood paneled. There was an oil painting of a house on one. Lori was standing at the entrance to the chapel. Her white face shuddered, opened and closed and opened around a single long sob. I walked toward her with my arms half-spread, mumbling condolences. She gripped me bone tight.

“What am I going to do?”

I sat in a pew and watched the procession of people file past the open coffin. Several had to be supported. One woman’s face looked like water going down a drain. The low sound of crying erased the edges of every other sound. Whispers, footsteps, thoughts, purse snaps, and even a faint singing rose and sank in the crying. It was a sea of tears, everything floated in it. Minutes floated by.

The Percocet, after opening a tiny white hole in me, closed up like a wound. I grew restless. I looked at the brown wood-paneled wall of the chapel. Outside, the day was going off like an alarm. Cars shot out of alleys. People stood in lines at counters. They looked out windows. The tubes of outer space hung down through the gas sky. Letting in a little nothing. Inside the millions of suburban houses was something worse than nothing. Couches connected to carpets connected to refrigerators connected to televisions.

The soft sounds of crying in the chapel sounded suddenly dry to me. Like a constant dry cough. The world was thirsty. It was thirsty for escape. It had died of that thirst.

My father nudged me. It was my turn to kneel before the open coffin and look into it. I walked up, knelt down, and looked in.
This is what a human face looks like
, I thought.
I have some perspective now
, I thought.
No, this is what you look like after you die
, I thought.
To someone else. This is what you always look like to other people
, I thought.
This is what I look like to my father and Funboy and Eva
, I thought.
This is who I really am
, I thought. My thoughts moved fast, like I told Jenny. One connected to another connected to another connected to another. Something worse than nothing. After an appropriate amount of time I stood up and went back and sat down.

I thought of telling Jenny to drive me out of there, but I knew nothing would be different anywhere else. I didn’t know where to score in Chicago. And even if I did, I couldn’t do it. It would be three days in a row. That would make me an addict. So I decided to just stay put. Better to turn in the slot I was in than to twitch out in the open. I closed my eyes and imagined a white hole opening in the middle of things. I imagined a white flood rushing over the desert world. I opened my eyes. There were white holes everywhere, but they were all dry. The father’s caved-in face, Lori’s open and shut and open mouth, Barb’s parted lips.

White tops are white. I guess death is another meaning of the color white. Barb’s white face in the coffin.

In some ways, this association is misleading. I’d already overdosed once (in Holland with Eva), and I would overdose again. You could describe my behavior in a general sort of way as suicidal. But I never really believed I was close to dying, or that I could die, or that I was dying. Maybe I was too close to see it. Or maybe in white time, death is a difference that doesn’t make a difference. Think of Fathead, or Henry. Junkies tend to be drawn to metaphysical schemes in which dying is like moving a piece on a checkerboard, or like moving from one room to another, or even like moving around in the same room.

The reality of death is something you don’t see until you are cured. When you can see it, it’s a sign you’re cured. When you are cured, you can see the difference death makes. It divides one world from the next. It divides each living moment from every other. Change. Wonder. Peace. Surprise. The fact of death is the deep source of health. But in white time, it’s a white line in a white room. I crossed over from Chicago to Baltimore about ten days after the funeral.

I hadn’t planned to stay for so long and I wished I hadn’t. But it was just one thing after another, hanging around my dad’s house. When it got to be the time in the day when decisions are made, I’d usually be kind of drunk. I was doing a lot of thinking about certain problems my new lifestyle in Baltimore had confronted me with. For instance, if I did dope three days in a row, I’d be an addict. I believed that. It made sense. Don’t feed Gremlins after midnight, don’t do heroin three days in a row. Who would do heroin three days in a row? An addict.

But I wondered how you were supposed to count three days in a row. I wondered if the first day you did it was “one.” Or maybe the space of time between the first day you did it and the next day would be “one.” And then the next day would be “two.” And then the next day would be “three.” So if you started on Monday, Friday would be the first day you’d have to stop to make sure you didn’t turn into an addict. Right? It was pretty confusing. When Funboy said, “Just don’t do it three days in a row,” he made it sound so easy. Of course, it was pretty obvious he’d failed at not doing it three days in a row. You could count it any way you wanted.

I wanted to take advantage of my time in Chicago. I planned to go to the art museum to see if they had any Fragonard paintings. I wanted to check out some bookstores. I wanted to visit some old friends. My fast thoughts ate holes in my plans. I wondered how to turn my thoughts into weapons. I had a drink of orange juice mixed with gin. I called the department secretary and excused my absence with reference to the death in the family. I lay on the floor for a little while. Then I called to change my ticket and asked Jenny to give me a ride to the airport the next day.

White and gold clouds of fun hid Baltimore as the plane descended. The region had been in the grip of a late heat wave for the past week. I stepped out into the heavy Baltimore air. All the lethargy that had sogged my bones in Chicago turned into something rich and strange.

I’m putting down roots in this city
, I thought. When the first colonists arrived in Maryland, they thought it was a weird paradise. They were amazed at the lushness of the vegetation. They remembered stories they’d heard of the lands of the Aztecs far to the south. My vegetable nerves swayed in the invisible Baltimore waves.

In the heated air, the difference between land and sky dissolves. Especially if there’s any sun. Then the Baltimore color goes all the way through, like the taste of oranges goes all the way through an orange. Life is a brick of solid gold. The murder rate goes up like a thermometer, showing the power of this new atmosphere. The Baltimore murder rate stayed above three hundred the whole time I was getting high.

I’d saved a half vial in the glove box of my car for my return, and I did it in the darkness of the parking garage.

I drove out into the center of the day. The Baltimore streets can go dead in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t even a Sunday. I drove through the stately empty streets like they were Aztec ruins. It wasn’t just me. The drone of ancient sleep passed through my bones. The alien shapes of plants and buildings lay in ninety-five degrees of heat. No definite outlines, no borders. Baltimore. Anyone who knows will know.

I bought a Coke at the corner store, then entered my building. My legs inside my jeans got sweaty from the short walk. It was devil hot. I checked my mail in the ornate decayed lobby. A thick pile fell out of the box. Bills, bills, bills. I picked out one of the oldest. The paper envelope looked a little yellow with age. As I filed through the rest of the pile the envelopes turned threatening shades of orange and red. “Response Required!” “Overdue!” “Turn off notice!”

When was the last time I’d checked my mail? It was a Monday, I remember, because I’d been coming back from Ferguson’s seminar. Was that the day before I left? The day before that? Let’s see. I’d been gone for ten days. (Gone but not forgotten.) If today was Wednesday, then I left on a…Do I start counting backward from today? Is today “one”? Or is yesterday “one”?