White Out (24 page)

“Where is the dope? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

I tried. I was out of practice.

“I said look at me!”

It wasn’t just my lifestyle, either. Evolution has made these face-to-face meetings obsolete. Unnecessary. Unpleasant. In the distant tribal past all communication took place in face-to-face encounters. Then came drums, money, drugs, writing. Panic and desire sounded through jungles in drumbeats. Panic and desire dispersed across continents in markets and caravans. Panic and desire dispersed across time through white molecules of opium. Humanity received new, possible bodies. Communication spread beyond the face-to-face.

Since then, direct communication between people-heads in the present has been mainly used for religious and police purposes.

“Please place your right hand on the Bible and repeat after me.”

“You may now kiss the bride.”

“Look at me when I’m talking to you. Where is that goddamn dope?”

The people seemed to enjoy my confusion. They flaunted the expensive obsolescence of face talking.

“See,” they seemed to say, “we’ve got so much time and money we can afford to just stand here talking to your face.”

But when they really want to know, they don’t stand around talking into faces. When narcotics agents want to measure the effectiveness of their policies, they buy a bag of dope. They listen to the price. A high price means they’re winning a little, a low price means they’re losing a little.

When the dealers want to control an area, they spiral out through cell phones, little scraps of paper with digits written on them, numbers on high school bathroom walls, U-Hauls and station wagons, color-coded vials.

And when the junkies want to travel through time, when they want to erase the present by joining the immaculate white past and the immaculate white future—the way you fold a sheet in half—they buy a bag of dope.

Dope is information. Just like prices on objects or the code traveling through fiber-optic cables. The dope molecules carry information to the brain’s memory glands, where time is manufactured. At every instant the addict inhabits at least two times at once: the first time he did it and the next time he will do it. Right now is the switchboard.

What is true of time is also true of space. At every instant the addict is in several different places at once. Blood circulates within the borders of the skin. But the addict’s need for dope opens his mind-body system to the world. To the circulatory system of the world dope supply. The addict’s veins and nerves spool out through prices on bags, fiber-optic cables where dealers’ voices peel away from their bodies, airplanes landing in empty fields. The dope body spreads out like an open fire hydrant.

So when the people stand looking at the addict face-to-face, they don’t see much. They don’t expect much. An addict doesn’t fully materialize in the present. When I looked in the mirror back in Baltimore, I got an odd feeling that I wasn’t really seeing myself. Because I wasn’t really seeing myself.

The people looked at me. They snorted in disgust.

“OK, beat it!”

They turned their bright people faces off me. I walked back over to where I’d dropped my dope when I’d first heard the people sounds. I felt the people faces sweeping the area, lighting up the dirty pavements and graffiti pillars. My dope lay in a shallow crack of shadow between two long people looks. I bent over and pretended to tie my shoe. I picked up the bag, stood up, and walked off quick.

“I don’t believe it. Hey, smart guy! Get your ass right back over here.”

I dropped the dope again and turned slowly around into the sharp human facelight.

“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? Carl, go pick up that bag he just dropped. Unbelievable. No willpower at all.”

Addiction has nothing to do with willpower. It took enormous willpower to pick up that dope right in front of the people. If anything, the problem is too much willpower.

“I said come back over here! Damn, Carl, it’s like talking to…hello,” the person waved his hands in front of my eyes, “is anybody at home? Is anybody in there?”

Now he was getting warmer. Because, of course, I wasn’t really in there. To pass through addiction is to come to terms with not being where you are. More and more people are entering the modern world by passing through addiction. Perhaps in the future everyone will have to pass through. Like a gateway. Leave your human body on this side, and pick up your possible body on the other.

“Are you listening to me, junkie?”

Kind of. But the people like you to be all there. 100 percent there. They’re old fashioned. They like to look at you and know.

“Gimme your wallet. All right, let’s see here…Michael Clune. That your name, junkie?”

So they took me to jail. Jail is kind of like a forest preserve. It’s a space for preserving a form of life that mostly died out long ago. A life form without connections. Without money or dope or cell phones. The people like to see you down there in the jail. You remind them of people. All the junkies and dealers standing around in the bullpen talking to each other like people. Biting on each other like people. Like the people.

They brought me and the other one in and talked to us in separate rooms. They were trying to find out something about some dealer called “Rabbit.”

“Is Rabbit the one who sold you this shit?”

“Is Rabbit still around here?”

“Does Rabbit wear a red bandanna?”

“Is Rabbit the guy we picked up with you?”

I answered yes to all the questions. Especially the last one.

“Yes!”

I’d known the guy a few weeks. I liked him. Black guy in his forties. Always complaining about the cold. His street name was “Tiger” or something. Some name a six-year-old would pick. I’d never heard of Rabbit. I knew the guy busted with me wasn’t him. The people probably knew too. But I thought it was important to demonstrate my complete willingness to rat anybody out at any time. I could imagine what the people would say.

“You know, Carl, I was wrong about that kid,” one person would say. “I think we got us a real good one here.”

“We sure do,” the other one said. “I mean, if he’s willing to rat out his friends for things they haven’t even done, just think what he’d do if he actually met someone who did something!”

“Maybe he’s worth more to us free,” the first one said. “Maybe we should turn him loose. Give him some money. A car. A badge.”

“Maybe some dope, too. I mean, he’s got to blend in…”

“Yes, he’s Rabbit,” I said again. “He’s a big-time dealer.”

But the people didn’t commission me as a secret narcotics agent. They lost interest in my answers even before they finished asking the questions. People are like that. Easily distracted. Sometimes they get depressed all of a sudden. The people who’d been questioning me kind of sat back mumbling to themselves. I think they were talking about New Year’s. It was New Year’s Eve.

“And then Molloy calls in sick and who do they bring in but me. Any other night of the year, fine. But this is New Year’s Eve and my girl is…”

“Yeah, Carl. Well today I was sitting in my squad car and got the call…”

“I have tomorrow night off, but right now I gotta…” Now. Today. New Year’s Eve. This was the talk of people confined to a single time and place. The talk of the people. Finally, they seemed to remember me.

“OK, it’s back to the cell with you, buddy.”

At least they called me buddy. That was a small victory.

“You know,” I told my buddy as he was walking me down. “I’m really going to quit this time. This arrest is just what I needed. Soon I’ll be a person again.”

“Yeah whatever,” he said. “That’s what they all say.”

He was right. The cure doesn’t turn junkies into people. Who would give up dope for that?

CHAPTER 12

T
hat was eight years ago, in Chicago.
Hey, smart guy! Get your ass right back over here.

These days I follow the law. Almost eight years off dope. I even go to NA meetings now. I finished my dissertation five years ago. Got a job in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan three years ago. Now I’ve moved again. I’m living in Florida as I write this. No shirt, no shoes, no service. I think they have a law against feeding the alligators, too, but that’s about it. And no one follows the first law except me. Only me. When I get out of bed in the morning, I put on my shirt. Then I put on my shoes. Then I ask for service.

While I was in Ann Arbor, I finished the introduction to my academic book, and a university press gave me a contract for it. I went on the job market and got flown out to a few different campuses to give job talks.

At one of them, a prestigious department at a great university on the West Coast, my old friend Cash tried to kill me. He didn’t succeed, obviously. It’s an open question how hard he really tried. He was drinking a lot of Robitussin, for one thing. A lot. He had gotten hold of some guns somehow—aren’t felons supposed to not have guns?—but his ability to use them was questionable. It’s a long story. When I got back from California, I withdrew my candidacy with a shiver of relief, and ignored the shocked and angry emails from the faculty there. And the demented and angry emails from Cash.

My hopes of leaving Michigan dwindled. An Ivy League school flew me out for an interview, but they ended up giving the job to someone else. I was number two. I watched the Michigan snow pile up.

Then, out of the blue, I got this great offer from a university in Florida. Good money. Low cost of living, better weather. Not very prestigious, but big things were happening down there. When they flew me down to the campus, the chair told me all about it.

“The state has made a big commitment to the university, Michael,” he said. He was smiling. “Our department is currently rather small, but it has just received a tremendous amount of money. You will be the first of an anticipated thirty new hires. If you come here, you will have an opportunity to shape the growth of this department into a powerhouse in the discipline. You will have a degree of input enjoyed by few junior faculty anywhere.”

I like the sun. Ann Arbor has fewer sunny days than Seattle. I signed on the line. I flew down again in April and got a great place in a cool part of town. In early summer I said my good-byes to my friends in Michigan, the movers picked up my stuff, and I drove down to meet them. I like driving. Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia. It got hotter.

Soon after crossing into Florida I stopped and got some gas. It was hot as hell. I went inside the store and got a twenty-ounce Coke. I went to the counter and the lady rang it up.

“Sixty cents,” she said.

Only sixty cents? I looked at the bottle. It seemed perfectly good.

“Really?” I said.

“Sixty cents,” she repeated.

Why did they feel like they couldn’t charge at least a dollar for it? Every other state I drove through did. Even Kentucky. I looked at the lady behind the counter.

“Sixty cents?”

She smiled weakly back.

In Florida they just don’t have the confidence to charge a dollar. “Who do we think we are?” they say. Sixty cents. That wasn’t a good sign. They don’t have any state income tax either. I picked up a couple newspapers and scanned the headlines.

I felt like someone had punched me in the throat. I quickly skimmed the story. “State revenue projections plummet…governor vetoes tuition hike…legislature demands universities admit more students.” The perfect storm. “‘We’re at breaking point,’ says University Chancellor.”

Were they going to take away my new job already? I should have gone to California. I could have bought a gun. Yes, Cash. Two can play that game. I’d be more than a match for him. Especially if he’d been drinking. Catch him slipping and BLAM! See his tiny head coming around the corner and BLAM! Creep up on him while he was sleeping, shove the gun in his mouth, and BLAM! I was freaking out. I called my old friend Dave.

“Well,” he said slowly. “They can’t fire you. You have a signed contract.”

“Thank God for that,” I said.

“But they can squeeze you to death. First they’ll cut your travel money. Then they’ll cut your journal subscriptions. Then they’ll tell you to teach more classes. It’s the same story at state universities around the country.”

“What is?”

“Everyone wants to cut higher education. For the Republicans, cutting funding for higher education is like being tough on crime. You know how it is in Congress.” He imitated a southern senator’s voice.

“The American people need to know the kind of trash that is being taught in our universities today. Here is a textbook that says that Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual. And this book says that Shakespeare was a homosexual. This book says that Norman Rockwell’s art is gay. Norman Rockwell! This is a picture of Santa Claus by Norman Rockwell. Does that look gay to you?”

Of course it looked gay to me, but maybe that proved Dave’s point. He did have some good news about Cash, though. After some soul searching, Cash had figured out he didn’t have to quit drinking after all. He was just doing weekend binges now, and his liver felt fine. The one undeniable problem, however, was that every time he got drunk, he fell. A lot. He’d wake up with his head bloody and covered with bruises.

This was a problem, but hardly an insoluble one. Cash had discovered a solution. Now when he felt that itch for a drink, he would put on a helmet. They made good lightweight helmets for motorcyclists. Dave left me with the touching image of Cash sitting alone in his apartment, slowly strapping a helmet to his head, turning on some quiet music, and pouring Aristocrat whiskey into a coffee mug until it started to spill over the edges.

I hung up and walked around my new neighborhood wringing my hands. Why had I come here? All they care about in this state is cutting taxes. I looked at the self-satisfied Floridians. Middle-aged women with ankle bracelets. They should be very highly taxed to pay for higher education. An Italian guy with oil on his muscles. He should be forced to face the fact that Lincoln was maybe gay. And that he is definitely gay. A smirking septuagenarian getting out of a Mercedes. Where did he get that car? What did he need with it? He should be taxed to death. Through the plate glass I saw a couple jolly Republicans sipping mojitos. I imagined them being slowly taxed to death.