White Out (2 page)

You see? When you first get a new car you notice everything about it. The color is so beautiful, so shiny, so deep, so intense. After a few weeks you hardly see it. After a few months, there’s a sense in which you don’t see it at all.

That doesn’t happen with dope. Dope never gets old. It never gets familiar. It’s always new. It’s a deep memory disease. This disease is much stranger and simpler than nostalgia. With nostalgia, you see a thing. The thing triggers a memory of a good time. Then you start to want that good time to come back. That’s complex. It’s a multistage process.

Now watch what happens to the addict. I’m sitting there at Dom’s, minding my business. Henry’s kind of talking, I’m kind of listening. Then I see a white-topped vial. Wow. I stare at it. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. I know I’ve seen it ten thousand times before. I know it only leads to bad things. I know I’ve had it and touched it and used it and shaken the last particles of white from the thin deep bottom one thousand times. But there it is. And it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. The first time I encountered dope isn’t somewhere else, it isn’t in the past.
It’s right over there.
It’s on the table.

Something that’s always new, that’s immune to habit, that never gets old. That’s something worth having. Because habit is what destroys the world. Take a new car and put it in an air-controlled garage. Go look at it every day. After one year all that will remain of the car is a vague outline. Trees, stop signs, people, and books grow old, crumble and disappear inside our habits. The reason old people don’t mind dying is because by the time you reach eighty, the world has basically disappeared.

And then you discover a little piece of the world that’s immune to habit. There’s a little rip in my brain when I look at a white-topped vial. The rip goes deep, right down to the bone, to the very first time. People love whatever’s new. Humans love the first time. The first time is life. Life is always fading. The work of art is to make things new. The work of advertising is to make things new. The work of religion, the work of science, the work of philosophy, the work of medicine, the work of car mechanics. Their tricks all work, a little bit, for a little while, then they get old. The addict, alone among humans, is given something that is always new.

It’s not the feeling of doing the drug that stays new. The drug high starts to suck pretty quickly. Pretty soon it sucks so bad you quit. Never again. Then you see a white top. Or even imagine you’re seeing one. And it’s the first time you’ve ever seen it. Addiction is a memory disease. Memory keeps things in the past. Dope white is a memory disruption agent. The powder in the vial is a distribution technology. It carries the white down the tiny neural tunnels where the body manufactures time. Dope white turns up in my earliest memories. I remember Mom’s white teeth. My future whites out.

I’m cured now. Ten years. How? How did I escape my white mind and body? How did I exit the white pollution of the past and the future, the white mind where every thought and feeling is a long or short road to the white tops? I’m outside. I’m free. But how? Can you run from yourself? Try it. It’s impossible. But I did it. I ran out of myself. How? Once you get a glimpse of something that never gets old you’ll never be able to live like the others. I don’t want to give too much away. There’s a flaw in my memory. Luckily there’s also a flaw in time.

Dom wakes up. He pulls himself together in a literal way. His eyes kind of go back into their sockets. He is a big hearty man. The syringe is still in his neck. It makes him look kind of military, like he’s a soldier from the future. Henry, with his missing arm, looks kind of military too.

“I’m going to get the white tops, Mike,” Dom says. Henry stands up. “Get the walkie-talkies, Henry.” Henry goes over to an open black gym bag, takes out one walkie-talkie, takes out another, then takes out a gun.

“When I’m halfway there,” Dom says, “I’m going to say OK through the walkie-talkie. When I get there, I’m going to say OK. When I get the stuff. When I get halfway back. Mike, if more than five minutes go by between when you hear from me, give Henry the gun, open the door for him, and get out of his way.”

“Yes Dom.” I say it in the deferential high-pitched voice I used to reserve for cops or teachers. Now I use it with everyone. “I want you to be careful Dom. I really care about you.” I pause. “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I really like you. I want you to take care of yourself. When you come back, we should talk about getting you some help.”

Language is a total luxury in a white out. A full sentence is like a Rolex. I’m still straight, but already feeling really luxurious. I feel like blowing my nose with twenties. “I’ll even drive you to get help, if you want.”

“OK.” Dom says through the walkie-talkie. “OK.” “OK.” “OK.”

The ancient Mongols believed the soul lives in the head. So when he captured his most hated enemies, Genghis Khan would have their eyes ears nose and mouth sewn shut before they were decapitated, so their soul could not escape the death of the body. My memory would probably seep out through my neck in a white fog.

It was three months later. I knocked on Dom’s door. Rain was pouring from heavy brown clouds. He opened, looked furtively around, then stood aside as I went in. He was holding his gun. “I got troubles, Mike.” I nodded.

“Fathead says Dom fucked up the package,” Henry squittered. Dom squittered. A rope of spit hung from his lip. “But it sure was nice Henry,” he said.

“They say if you was to lay out a man’s veins all in a straight line they’d go from Baltimore to Philly,” said Henry, “And old Henry’d be one of them old-time railroad workers, driving a spike in every three feet.”

“And I’ve been working on the railroad too,” said Dom, “All the live-long day.”

I gave Dom eighty dollars in folded tens and twenties. That’s what it took, day in and day out, just to keep that white light shining. And if it ever dimmed the devils came out. Now the white light was so dim they were sticking their little paws and claws for whole seconds inside me, like children testing the water at the beach. The day before I’d bitten down too hard on a forkful of potatoes and taken a big chip out of my front tooth. I guess I’d thought the potatoes would be harder. I didn’t used to make that kind of mistake.

Dom took the money and Henry opened the closet door. He moved a coat from over a hole in the floor, and pulled a bundle out of the hole. Then he pulled five little white-top vials out of the bundle and tossed them to me. I got shy with desire. Ran to the bathroom. When I got out of the bathroom the dimming white light was bright again inside me and the devils were burning to death in it.

When I got out of the bathroom Fathead was standing in the hall between Dom and Henry with a big hand over each of their shoulders.

“Hey there Mike!” he said brightly. He moved his hand to Henry’s neck and gave it a little squeeze.

“Ow, Fathead!” Henry honked.

“I said hey there Mike.” I kind of stood there.

“Hey Fathead.”

“Why don’t we go back into the kitchen where we can all sit down? You still have chairs back there, right Dom?” He gave Dom’s neck a friendly squeeze. Dom didn’t make a sound.

We all trooped back to the kitchen and sat down. Dom’s eyes were a little bloodshot, and his skin was even whiter than usual. Next to him, the off-white aluminum refrigerator in the corner had a healthy human glow. I hadn’t noticed it before. It looked kind of friendly. Like it wanted to tell me something.

“Let me tell you how to get that permanent white, son,” I imagined it saying. “Just slip your head in here and have them boys shut the door real real hard on your neck.”

“That’s a real nice refrigerator, Dom,” I said.

“Thanks, Mike,” Dom mumbled. His big black-and-blood eyes opened on me like dogs’ mouths.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Fathead said, “you should see if you can sell that refrigerator, Dom. Maybe you could get two hundred dollars for it. Then, if you found twenty other refrigerators and sold them for two hundred each, you could pay me what you owe.”

Fathead was a powerfully built white man about forty-five years old. The previous winter he’d been released from prison after serving eleven years. He’d made some good contacts in prison, and when he got out he started dealing. He’d bunked with Dom in prison for a couple years. Dom had gotten out first, but they stayed in touch, and Fathead began fronting him packages the past spring. Fathead had a huge habit, which he’d had since his twenties.

He’d kept it going straight through his prison years. His pride was that he’d never once gone through withdrawal in the whole eleven years. This was a unique, almost impossible achievement. Even the street dealers from the nearby projects who had only contempt for addicts had respect for Fathead. He was also some kind of religious freak, which I think they also respected. I did too, kind of.

Now he prepared to shoot up in front of us. Almost lazily, demonstrating that this was pure fun, that the white fire was always burning strong in him and never went out.

“Men,” he said, emptying a large vial into a spoon, “there are two forces in this world. What are they, Dom?”

“God and the creature,” Dom whispered through papery lips.

“God and the creature,” Fathead repeated. He closed his eyes. “And the creature, the creature must be induced.”

He lifted a lighter under the already blackened spoon. Then he paused. Kind of chuckled. His face took on a kind of grandfatherly softness.

“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?”

“Inducing the creature,” said Dom.

“How about when you don’t want the dog pissing all over the kitchen, and he does it, and you give him a little pinch?” He put down the lighter and circled Henry’s one arm with his hand. Henry flinched, but Fathead, after letting his hand rest around Henry’s arm for a couple seconds, just picked up the lighter again.

“Inducing the creature,” Dom whispered.

“I had a lot of time to think when I was locked up,” Fathead continued, drawing the fluid into the syringe through a cotton ball. Microscopic white grains swam through that fluid, sometimes two of them would meet, and a second of time would spark out. I wondered what drugs did to you.

“I had a lot of time to think and read, and I’m a lot older now. And maybe I’m not an intellectual.” I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, and when Fathead had found this out he took to calling me an intellectual.

“And I hate intellectuals. Vanity. Listen to me.” He held the syringe before all of us. I could never have afforded a shot like that. It should have been in a museum. “Inducing the creature,” he said softly. He felt expertly along his neck till he found the pulsing vein. There was a black tattoo of a cross running down his neck and the vein pulsed along the cross. He slid in the needle and pressed down on the syringe.

His eyes closed for maybe ten seconds. Henry shifted uncomfortably. Fathead’s blue eyes shot open.

“The creature is induced to crawl. Induced to walk. Induced to beg. To soil itself or not to soil itself. The sin is not the inducement. That’s what those old Christians in the joint never understood.”

Dom nodded dully. Dom could probably have burned out a century with what was moving inside him at that moment. A stolen century. Stolen from Fathead.

“The sin is not the inducement,” Fathead continued. “That He may raise up the Lord casts down. Even unto the pit. This shit we think we’re doing here.” He laughed. “Another eye burns in our eye, another hand reaches through our hand. This,” he held up his thick, needle-scarred hand, “this is a glove.” He gazed thickly on it. “An abode for any spirit of the air. Every unrighteous and unclean spirit.”

He must have learned to talk that way in prison. Maybe in solitary. He didn’t really seem to be addressing us. When he talked like that you kind of saw a different side of talking. As if talking wasn’t meant for talking to people.

“And that’s what God is,” Fathead said. “When the creature is induced to crawl out of the creature. I’ve seen it myself. The whatever leaving his eyes, ‘dying.’ Crawling into the invisible world. A thousand spirits curled up in a spoon. You should see the spirit leaving a man’s face; you can feel the room get thicker. I’ve done it myself. I’ll do it again.”

“Tuesday,” Dom said weakly.

“Fuck Tuesday,” Fathead said. “The first time I give you something nice you fuck it up.”

“It just got tooken, Fathead,” Henry gabbled. “It got tooken, it all got tooken, that’s all, like we said, maybe that pimp, maybe those hoes, maybe some customers.”

Fathead’s response was obscure.

“You’re a little, little monkey, Henry,” he said.

Then he balled up his right hand into a fist and brought it down, hard, on Henry’s open hand. Henry only had one hand, so the effect was kind of intense. Henry yelped and stuttered but Fathead kept his fist planted on Henry’s open hand like a railroad spike.

“And those fucking whores you’ve got staying around here, Dom? I saw their little pimp come by the other day when I was leaving. Are they like sixteen? You know what the time on a charge like that is? What, does he give you like a hundred a week to let the whores crash here? He’s scum. Driving a little Honda? Thinks he’s a pimp?” Fathead drove a new black Mercedes S500. His eyes and face were solid zombie surface. I wasn’t getting anything from him for free. I needed to get out of there. I got up.