White Out (20 page)

Maybe you notice it, maybe you don’t. But when it’s gone you feel a little strange. A certain distance. I felt a little distant from myself. From that distance my hand and the faucet looked about the same. The way houses look from outer space. Black dots on black dots. Which one is yours?

Where had I traveled, to get that distance from myself? And did part of me stay behind, to notice how strange it all was? What was left of me when I changed? Where did it stay? And if nothing was left, then how could I even tell I was different? You see what I mean.

Because I’m not saying this change was totally obvious. I’m not saying I stopped caring about myself or anything. I’m not saying I stopped being able to walk around, or teach a class, or fall asleep, or read a book, or recognize a familiar face (even my own). I mean, I could still function very well. Pretty well. For a long time, another year or so, I was able to function just fine. It’s not like I had to get on my hands and knees to get across a room. (Not often, anyway.)

But humans have certain, almost invisible adaptations to this world. We’re made for these minutes and seconds and seasons. We’re sensitive to differences that don’t seem to matter, and are hard to describe. The human body has a grip on this world. The white body, the white eye, the white mind: It just doesn’t have the same grip.

I stood looking at my face in the mirror. It looked the same as the things. Not bad. Not good. A lot of white, though. Maybe it was the lighting? The metal faucet looked white too. There was an odd spreading brown bruise on my thumb. How had that happened? The phone rang. I threw up into the toilet and went back to bed.

What was there in bed? Memories of my computer game. I’d been playing a game called Civilization. In it, you try to take over the world. I set the difficulty level to “Easy.” I was playing the Germans. I had tanks, and my rivals, the Egyptians, were still using knights on horses.

As I lay in bed shaking from the bad dope I imagined line after line of horses meeting my tanks. I imagined the staccato of the tanks’ machine guns, then the heavy boom of the big tank guns, then the machine guns, then the dying horses, the bullets biting the knights’ faces, the boom of the big tank guns.

What happens when a tank shell hits a knight charging at full speed across a muddy field? A white fire. Bullets coming through the thick sunset, the thick Egyptian dusk. Like Morocco. Eva’s eyes swam up through the dusk like death kisses. Catching white knights unawares.

I imagined my capital, Berlin, surrounded by lush jungle. I had built the Eiffel Tower in it. It was the number one city in the world. The dope I was doing now was deep brown. It even tasted brown. I also had the number two, three, and five cities. Egypt had number four. Thebes. Brown like coffee. Do they smuggle dope in coffee? My hands shook. My legs were scratched to hell. My tanks approached Thebes inexorably. The valiant, doomed Egyptian knights sallied forth. The phone rang again.

The bullet-air was like a mouth chewing on the knights’ white swords and brown horse faces. Today was a Thursday. I had two hundred dollars of unusually deep brown dope on my dresser. It was making me sick. When I took it I got nauseous and threw up and lay in bed waiting for it to wear off.

As it began to wear off the nausea subsided and the first little shakes and fevers of withdrawal started. I got up and took shaky steps back over to the dresser and stared again at the bad brown dope. Can your eyes get bruised? Can you get bruises on your eyes? I did some more of the dope and the withdrawal shiver vanished.

I threw up again. I crawled back to bed. Do you know what immortality is? When you have tanks and they have horses, and death is a length of brown carpet between your bed and the dresser. Death is the toilet handle. Death is closing your right eye and opening your left eye. Then death is waiting. Alive and waiting. Then death is opening your right eye and closing your left eye, then it is waiting again, and then it is throwing up.

Then, standing gasping over the toilet, I heard them. Through the thin body haze they appear: the immortal pixilated brown computer dope tanks.

Before children arrive at the stage of wanting to be firemen or soldiers, they pass through the stage of wanting to be fire trucks or tanks. Unkillable red trucks, unkillable brown tanks. I was sunk in the mud of that stage, the heavy brown treads of the dope tanks churning my memory to mud. And killing hundreds of thousands of people. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang.

Each time you call a dope fiend who doesn’t want to talk to you, that fiend’s hate spins down through time and memory and kills a living person.

In this way, when I was six, I learned of the death of one of my neighbors. She died behind the white face of her house. It got her there. Hate out of the future surprised her when she was lying down for a little nap after lunch.

She was a nice older lady. She wore white gloves and a blue dress. She had a nice car. My mother called us into the kitchen.

“Kids, you know how I told you Mrs. Nichols was sick?” We nodded. I shifted from foot to foot smiling. I had been in trouble for something earlier and was now perfect.

“Well, Mrs. Nichols passed away last night. God took her. She was old. She lived a good life, and she is in a happy place now.” I looked up at my mother and saw a half smile on her quiet church face. It was clear to me she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“How does that make you feel, kids?” While Mom was talking, my sister was creeping. Now she stood far enough away from me that Mom could just barely look at both of us without turning her head. Then Jenny crept a little farther away.

“Jenny, come back here! I want to talk to you kids.” Jenny crept back. Mom looked expectantly between our faces.

“Mrs. Nichols was our friend and neighbor,” Mom continued. She looked at us expectantly. Mrs. Nichols. A happy place now. A thing like that. What could one say?

“Who,” I asked, “is living in Mrs. Nichols’s house now?”

Who indeed? Friendly pairs of houses faced each other across our quiet street. Our house faced Mrs. Nichols’s. The enormous white face of Mrs. Nichols’s house still turned toward us. After Mom dismissed us, I sat out on our steps and looked back at it. My friend Dan rolled up on his Big Wheel.

“What’re you doing, Mike?”

“Nothing. Mrs. Nichols passed away,” I said.

“Who?” Dan looked puzzled. He lived eight houses down from us. Living so far away, I didn’t expect him to have heard of her.

“Nobody,” I said. I tipped my head back and looked at the white clouds, the blue sky.

“My teacher has arth-rit-is,” I told Dan, pronouncing the big word slowly. He went to Lincoln public school while I went to St. Mary’s Catholic school across town. My first-grade teacher’s name was Sister Pancraceous. My parents thought her name was funny. Sometimes when she dropped something my mother would laugh and say, “Goodness gracious, Sister Pancraceous!”

“My grandma has arth-rit-is,” Dan said. “Her hands always hurt.” I nodded.

“My teacher told us that she got arthritis because she used to fidget when she was a kid,” I said. “She said if we keep very, very still we won’t get arthritis.”

After lunch one day, Sister Pancraceous told us how to prevent arthritis. The whole class practiced sitting very, very still together. I remember looking curiously at my own limbs.
They want to move so badly
, I thought. Dan looked worried.

“How long do you have to keep still?”

“Not that long,” I said. “And you can save it up. Every minute you keep very still you are saving it up for the future.”

“Is that what you are doing now?” Dan asked.

“Yes. I just want to save up a little bit today.”

I tilted my head back and looked at the sky again. I was unaware of how strange it was for a child to stare at the sky. I was six. My looking was tuned to human faces. To the little or big people faces of toys, shoes, televisions, Mom, chocolate bars, houses.

Looking into the sky, I felt like anything could happen. The sky was like a face that had come apart. The clouds rose in Mrs. Nichols’s windows.

Dan climbed off his Big Wheel and sat down Indian-style. He stared hard straight into the grass. After he had saved up maybe forty seconds of stillness he started plucking single blades of grass and counting them.

“One…two…three.” I watched him. He wasn’t just picking any blade.

“What are you doing?” I said, crouching down next to him. He had an intense look of concentration as he scanned dozens of grass blades. The day had clouded over. The outside was like a room now. It was people time again. Who lived in Mrs. Nichols’s house? I poked Dan on the shoulder.

“Look at this one,” Dan said. He held a blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger. I bent closer.

“What’s different about it?” I asked, puzzled.

“Look at it.” Gripping the slender pale-green blade firmly between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he pressed the tip of the fingernail of his right pinky against a tiny place in the blade.

I looked closer and saw the grass blade was made up of hundreds of strands, like a white sheet is made up of hundreds of white threads. Dan was pointing to one of them. His little finger shook with the effort.

“You see it?” The single strand he was pointing at had a faint red color. There was a slender red strand in the grass blade. I followed the thread of color up and down the blade’s two inches, to where all the strands ended in a shiny green sheath.

“I see it,” I whispered. He nodded, and opened his left palm. There were two other grass blades in it. Each had one of the red threads.

“They’re red-blooded,” Dan said.

“Blooded,” I whispered. I plucked a grass blade and held it against the sky. The blade was woven of strands that were white and yellow and brown and yellow-white and white-brown and white-white. I was surprised I had ever thought grass was plain green. Dan looked at me disapprovingly. He took the blade I was holding out my hand and threw it away.

“Look for the red-blooded ones,” he said. He continued to search. “Four,” he said. “Five,” he said. I got down on my hands and knees and started to look.

I never found one. I saw the blood every time he showed me one of his. Every time he patiently pointed it out with his shaking pinky I could see it. But I never found a blooded blade of grass myself.

All summer on clear days Mrs. Nichols’s house looked at the sky. On overcast days it stared blindly out, with a milky film on the windows.

And from time to time that summer, sitting on the grass with Dan while he slowly counted, I would be seized with panic. It was like a test. Why couldn’t I find any? Why couldn’t I see the red-blooded ones?

I thought then it was bad luck. I think now it was my bad habit of looking at the sky. I stared at the sky and I think there were things I missed because of it. Who taught me that habit? The person who lived in Mrs. Nichols’s house after she died taught me. It taught me to look at the sky and now I couldn’t see the tiny thread of red in one out of a hundred grass blades. I couldn’t see the really small things, the things you can’t see from the sky even with a ghost’s eyes.

I could see the larger shapes. The shapes you might remember from twenty or a hundred years out. Something as big as a house, sure. And I could see the colors of the future. White, and sometimes brown.

I lay undead on my bed with white sheets made of white threads, looking down into the past. Dogshit brown dope on my dresser. Had this happened before? I wondered. Or was it just the memory disease? It makes things seem like they happen twice. The phone rang. When I got up to get it, the line went dead. I went back to bed.
Maybe it was me
, I thought.
Prank calling myself from the future. A future of hate.
Just then there was a crack as my bedroom door swung open at a thousand miles per second and Henry stood armless in my doorway. Half-armless. One-armed.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Your door was open,” Henry said. His inhuman form rose where it shouldn’t have, leaning there in my bedroom like the Eiffel Tower. Or the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He looked at the dope on my dresser.