White Out (33 page)

When I went in from smoking I would stand at the big window in the living room for a few minutes. I’d watch the sunset before going down to my basement to watch the dayghost disappear. The sunset looked dark, almost purple. It was full of the wings of everything old coming back to me.

This book goes from Candy Land straight to Chip’s roof. From when I was six to when I was twenty-one. But that’s just the history of my dope body. And in that first post-heroin spring, my ageless dope body was gone. I’d traded it for a body that was like an empty hive. In the spring the missing swarms flew back through the sunset to fill it up again. Age five, age eight, age thirteen, age twenty.

“I’m part of you,” each new memory said as it flew through my eyes.

“Me too.”

“Remember me?”

Another memory. And another. Had I really lived so long?

“After a few months off dope, you’ll feel like yourself again,” the treatment center people had promised. Myself again. Age three, age nine, age seventeen. It was like inviting a few close friends for an intimate get-together and having five hundred people show up. I wanted to slip out the back.

Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.

Once the grip of the memory disease loosens, you are not free of the pain of memory. The pain and the memories just change. It’s not the dope memory that annihilates time, the dope world where your first time getting high is always new, always fresh in the thousandth bag of dope, the ten-thousandth. That time-eating angel or devil slept. Spring brought back my human memory.

In a human’s memory the years are clear to sight and closed to touch, like glass. The heroin memory says: You will never leave. The human memory says: You will never return. Human memory brings back what is lost along with its lostness. Its pastness.

An absolute distance shines in the beauty of human memories. The memory of me rowing my canoe with my friends, when I was eleven, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with the…The glittering water. The water glitters supernaturally when the total distance hits it. When every second of every day of every year that has passed hits it all at once. It glitters. The eyes of my friends too. My eyes too. Never mind. I don’t know where these tears come from.

My grade-school afternoons burned without being consumed in the blue television light flickering on my father’s basement walls. And the sudden chill at dusk reminded me of school play rehearsals. Once I had a red cape and a play sword; Elizabeth had a blue gown made of terrycloth…

Everything came back to me. The holy question “who am I?” was hard to sustain. It was hard to pretend I was some great mystery when every puddle and every slant of light knew me.

“I know you,” said the evening chill, “you were the pirate in the school play.”

“I know you,” said the sunset, “your bedtime was at eight.”

“I know you,” said the puddle. “When you were little I showed you a bit of the sky.”

Now the sky the puddle showed me had something to show me. The reflected bit of sky showed me…me. I looked at the puddle and my heart sank, full of ten thousand days.

Who am I? I am a being who is alive, fills up with time, and must die. In this human world, who I am has a simple answer. A first name and a last name. A body and a brain. Nothing more to me than what is in the mind of anyone who sees me passing and calls out my name.

Pretending there’s more to me than that is dangerous. Perhaps it conceals a secret longing for the dope body, the timeless body, the white eternity. Worse, this chasing after mystery is tasteless. It looks pretentious on a being who is born and then passes away. A being so full of dead time he sinks when everything else rises. When the heavenly days come—late April, early May—he fills up with memory and pastness and sinks away.

Catching all those human memories—in the sunsets, in the smell of cooking, in an old book I found under my bed—that was hard. And being back in human time, knowing that I would eventually die, that was hard too. But even worse was having to get a job.

What kind of job? By that spring, everyone agreed manual labor was the answer. Manual labor. It’s not good for Michael to mope around the house. What’s he doing all day? Fiddling with that dissertation? What’s he calling it? “Freedom from You?” What does that even mean? Manual labor. What else was I qualified to do? Undergrad degree in Russian history, partly through a grad degree in English literature. Partly qualified to be a professor; fully qualified to be a manual laborer.

Manual labor. The tenth floor of an office building under construction. It was like heaven. A wide-open bright space with nowhere to hide. And why would you want to hide? This isn’t a place for hiding. What are you doing hiding over there, Mike? Didn’t I tell you to sweep out this room an hour ago?

I knew all about manual labor. I was something of a master, in fact. I could teach you how to pick this up and bring it over there and put it down. Now pick that up. I think actually I’d be good at it. But no one ever offered me a job teaching manual labor. The job they offered me involved doing manual labor.

The word
manual
comes from the Latin word for
hand.
That’s misleading. Because you don’t have to be too good with your hands. I once worked with a guy who had a hook for a hand. He’d been a machine operator, then he had an accident and lost his hand. Now he was a manual laborer. Just to put it in perspective for you. Just in case you know Latin and think manual labor involves some kind of close and careful work with your hands. It does not. It’s the kind of job you can get when you lose your hands. You can push boxes with stumps.

My father came to me with the suggestion after I’d been hanging out in his basement not getting high for three months. It was hard to argue that I shouldn’t have a job. He’d been paying for me, helping me, never complaining about all the horrendous stuff I’d put the whole family through for years, the legal fees, the “borrowed” credit cards, etc. He’d been amazing, warm, supportive, loving. He let me stay in his house, drive his car. He paid for my car insurance, gave me money for clothes, movies, cigarettes. He’d asked for nothing in return. So when he mildly suggested that I should get a job, I could hardly respond by arguing that I shouldn’t. It was maybe easier to argue that I
couldn’t.
But to build up my self-esteem I refrained from taking that line. At first. Eventually I did take the position that I was incapable of even manual labor—and I stood firm on it—but at first I simply suggested that maybe I could get some other kind of job.

Dad saw through this for what it was—a way to buy time. The fact is that I had tried to get a non-manual-labor job before, and the result of that experiment made it unlikely that I could repeat it. After I graduated college, and before I learned that Johns Hopkins was going to pay for me to go to grad school for six years, I had called a temp agency and gotten an office-type job. I was supposed to work there for at least a year, and to give a month’s notice before I left. I was going to be taking over for the secretary of a small firm. This lady knew all the little ins and outs of the place, the kind of valuable, essential knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere. It was in her head. She’d train me, put all that stuff into my head, then she’d retire. It was stuff like what to do with invoices and where certain forms were kept. But I can’t really be more precise because two days into my training I got the letter from Hopkins and stopped listening. I was going to become a professor. I decided I’d go to Europe on vacation with Eva in a month to celebrate never having to get a real job again.

So there was no need to pay attention to the training, I just needed to earn a few weeks’ worth of money and then I’d be out. After two weeks of training me, the old lady left. There was an office party. The boss even took a picture of her symbolically handing over her keys to me. It was sad and fun. She’d been there twenty years. I got into the spirit of it, told her I’d miss her. I signed her card, “I can never replace you.”

The day after the party I came in and moved some papers around. I got seen walking purposefully around the office and talking seriously into the phone. All day long people passed by and dropped forms on my desk. I stuffed them in the drawers when no one was looking. I had no idea what to do with them. After four days the drawers of my desk were full. There wasn’t room for one more form. I started throwing them right in the trash can as soon as I got them. There were about sixty unreturned voice mails on my machine. People were starting to look at me a little funny. It was time.

Late that night I called in and left a message saying I had diarrhea and wouldn’t be able to come to work anymore. The next day I got a nice but puzzled voice mail from the boss of the firm. The day after that, nothing. The day after that I got a very angry message from the temp agency lady saying I’d never work for her company again. She said she was going to send a letter to her friends at the other temp agencies in town.

An evil deed never goes unpunished. So it was that five years later I found myself holding a broom on the tenth floor of a Chicago high-rise and longing for a cushy office job. The sounds and smells of construction rose around me. I pushed the broom a little ahead of me, then my arm got tired and I let it fall.

“Here, Mike, let me show you,” the supervisor said. “Like this.”

He took hold of the broom and began vigorously sweeping with short, quick strokes, raising a thick cloud of concrete dust. I watched with ill-concealed distaste. My way of sweeping came from an older, gentler place. It was environmentally friendly. Closer to the earth. My sweeping let things be as they are: the dust, the light, the air.

“See? You don’t even hold the broom right,” he said. “Hold it like this. Now. I want this room swept clean when I get back.”

I took hold of the broom in a weak and hopeless way. I smeared it along the ground until he was out of sight. Then I lit a cigarette and walked over to the window. There was a section of drywall propped up against a girder on the far side of the room. I contemplated it. Then I went and hid behind it.

The minutes passed. Actually, the seconds passed. If you are immortal and you want to get a feeling for human time, pick up a broom and head for a construction site. Manual labor is like a laboratory for isolating the properties of human time. Its weight, for instance. Each instant falls like a concrete slab on the one before it. Its slowness. Like a mountain falling down. Like a very old dog walking. Its weight. Like breathing with a fifty-pound dumbbell on your chest. Its slowness. Like reading a book in an unknown language.

And it never stops. And everything it takes is gone forever. I was back in it. I was outside the timeless dope body. Getting outside that body was thrilling. But the thrill wears off. It’s not like you can keep doing it. It doesn’t take much getting outside before you find yourself in a place you can’t get outside of. You’re just outside.

I crawled out from behind the drywall and checked my watch. Three minutes had passed. Two-and-a-half hours till lunch. I picked up the broom and began smearing it along the concrete. I checked my watch. It was going to take a while to feel comfortable with this outside time. To learn the tricks. It would take some time to find time’s weak spots. The holes and the tunnels. The skipped moments and the repeated moments.

And what if there weren’t any? I tensed; the broom froze in my hand. Then I relaxed. Of course there were. If my adventures had taught me anything, it was that time isn’t solid. It’s full of holes.

Ten minutes later I dropped the broom and walked off the job.

CHAPTER 16

W
hen I drove home after walking off the job site I was shaking.
I can’t take this
, I told myself.
I can’t do anything. Even manual labor.
The speedometer needle shook. The houses on the side of the road sucked into themselves, sucked into themselves, sucked into themselves.
Recovery
, I thought.
You can’t get back what you never had.
I drove with both hands. Seventy miles an hour. The people didn’t care.

When I parked and got out the world was still rippling with the insubstance of high speed. I wasn’t thinking about getting high. But it was thinking of me. The world was painted on one side of a plastic sheet, and an enormous dope high was standing on the other side. It snapped its fingers against the plastic and the world rippled.

I parked the car, went in and walked quickly down the basement stairs, not stumbling, breathing through my mouth. Into my bedroom. Picked up the phone and dialed.

“Yeah, Dad, I couldn’t really take it. Felt very anxious…Yes…No…No…Yes I’m fine.”

He was worried. The house was empty. It was the middle of the day. I looked at the dayghost. A single bright eyeball, rolled all the way back in the wall’s skull.
What a thing to have in my bedroom
, I thought.
Where I sleep
, I thought.