“Yes,” Alyssa said. Her eyes didn’t move.
I pictured her singing her crying baby to sleep at four in the morning.
The chair said that the required action was expulsion. She asked if Alyssa accepted the required action.
“No.”
“That will mean a disciplinary hearing.”
Alyssa nodded. “Will that be the same one as with Dr. Harrison? Or do I have to go to a second meeting?”
She left without saying a word to me.
* * *
As I walked through the park that afternoon, on my way to a meeting, I reviewed what I’d done. I’d caught a cheater. Now she wouldn’t be able to get her degree, which would’ve made her the first member of her family to graduate college. She’d mentioned that in her paper.
Or had she plagiarized that section, too?
I turned around and walked home.
* * *
Back at the apartment, I called Kit.
“Let me go outside,” Kit said. “I’m at work.” I heard the plates and conversations of postlunch Applebee’s fading away. “What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping you could mail me some pills.”
“Hey—not over the phone!”
“Sorry, sorry. I was wondering if you had any of those supplies my company was looking to purchase.”
“Okay, I got you. We got some valley girls right now and some emeralds.”
“What are those?”
“Valley girls are Valium and emeralds are E.”
“I’m actually just looking for the usual supplies.”
“You mean ShamWows?”
“Do I?”
“That’s what I call oxycodone.”
“Oh, okay. Then, yes—that’s what I mean.”
“Because OxiClean is that soap from the infomercials, and ShamWows are a sponge thing they sell on infomercials.”
“That’s good. I like that. So can I buy some ShamWows from you?”
“I don’t have any.”
A chill passed over me. “Do you know when you’ll have some in stock?”
“Not sure. My hookup got arrested for shooting a guy in the Harris Teeter parking lot in Leland last month.”
“What?”
“Yeah. When the cops came to my guy’s trailer with an arrest warrant, he had the gun lying right there on his bed. Not too smart if you ask me.”
“Do you have any, like, ShamWow Lites?”
“What?”
“HydroWows?”
Kit was quiet. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Hydrocodone. Vicodin. Suboxone. Methadone. Dilaudid. Tramadol. Codeine. Heroin.”
“Dude! Not on the phone!”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll text you later.”
He hung up and I stared at the phone for the better part of an hour. I wondered why I’d never learned how to shoot heroin—it would be much easier to buy if I didn’t need a snortable powder. Pain pills were hard to find from strangers. If you asked a shady-looking guy in the park, he always had a friend who had some pills, but then you had to take a cab to get to his friend’s house, which you had to pay for, and you were more likely to get robbed than get high. I sent myself a text to make sure the phone still worked. It did. I sweated and waited. I went online and searched for overseas pharmacies that would ship painkillers to the US without a prescription. I tried to order a hundred 5 mg hydrocodone from the least fake-looking pharmacy, but right after my order went through, I got a call from a man with an Indian accent saying that they couldn’t process my credit card and needed a copy of my bank statement. I hung up and cleared my browser history.
Then the phone rang. Kit’s number blazed up the screen.
“You’re about to love me, Jonas.”
“Yeah?”
“I can get you four strips of Suboxone for one twenty.”
“I love you.”
I hadn’t felt such a violent happiness since I’d quit drugs. I transferred $150 to Kit’s account, including $30 for overnight shipping. The future was boundless. It didn’t matter that my contract would not be renewed. I could do whatever I wanted. I needed to get out of Eugene, anyway. I could go anywhere—do anything.
But then, unexpectedly, fear hit. Fear that the high would end too quickly. Fear that it wouldn’t be as good as it had once been. Fear that the guaranteed warmth I’d always relied on would no longer be guaranteed.
And a new fear: fear that I would take too much and die.
But they were useless, these fears, because once I had drugs, I would take them. There was no question of not taking them.
* * *
In college, I’d been sitting in my living room one Sunday afternoon, full of regret. I’d drunk too much and messed things up with a girl. Stella was out of town and I had no one to share the burden of the hangover with. My neighbor showed up, unshowered in flip-flops and basketball shorts, nursing a cup of coffee, and asked if he could watch football on my TV. I didn’t like my neighbor, but I let him in.
As we watched the game, I’d told him, vaguely, “I’m hurting today.”
He stared at the TV and nodded without speaking. I felt stupid. But at the next commercial, he went to his apartment and returned with a bottle of Vicodin he’d been prescribed for a broken arm. “Have a couple. You’ll feel better.”
You’ll not only feel better, I learned. You’ll watch in amazement as all the sadness and anger and self-doubt disappears. You’ll suddenly like yourself. Everyone will like you, and because everyone likes you, you won’t need any one person. And for the next seven years, every time you’re full of regret, you’ll get high. And even if you’re not feeling that way, you’ll manufacture the feeling for an excuse to get high. Your body will simply learn to feel that way when it wants to get high. You’ll later read somewhere, If you’re lucky, you never find your perfect drug. But you’ll already have found it.
* * *
Tired of sitting with my thoughts and waiting for tomorrow, I changed into sweatpants and a hoodie to guard against the December chill, grabbed a basketball, and walked down the street to the courts underneath the overpass. Spanish Richard had once said that addicts invented problems so that they could justify using—which was astute, considering that I had never told him about any of the many problems I had invented to justify getting high. But this problem was not invented.
By the time I got to the park it was ten thirty, and the only other people out were a couple arguing underneath the opposite hoop. The woman was taller than the man. They both wore hoodies that obscured their faces, but I could see that they were white. I turned my back to them and focused on shooting free throws.
The woman yelled, “It’s not your bike, faggot.”
The man said, “It is my bike! I paid for it—and don’t call me a faggot.”
I shot a free throw that landed three feet short of the rim.
Then a crash. I turned. Both man and woman were on the ground, pulling at the bicycle—a beat-up silver BMX bike. They pulled hard, trying to yank it away from each other. The woman punched the man in the head.
The man stood up and stumbled backward. He clenched his fists and charged toward her.
I dropped the ball and took off. Next thing I knew, I was pushing my way between them.
“Hey!” I yelled.
Then someone punched me in the head. My brain rattled. I was instantly nauseous, a feeling that had come over me every time I’d been punched in the head.
“Oh, shit,” the man said, coming into focus. He took a step back. “I’m sorry.”
“What the hell!”
“I wasn’t trying to punch you! I was trying to punch my girlfriend!”
The woman took this opportunity to hop on the bike, bowleggedly pedal away, and yell, “You’re both faggots!”
“Damn,” the man said.
I rubbed my head. “Fuck.”
“I’m really sorry.”
I had never been able to not
accept an apology. “It was an accident. Accidents happen.”
My ex, Alexandra, whom I’d dated for two years, had twice attacked me—once with a fork that failed to pierce my sweatshirt and once with a glass she hurled at my head. The glass had nicked a vein in my forehead, and my first thought when I saw the blood was joy: I finally had incontrovertible evidence that she was in the wrong. I could use this evidence against her once I decided to take her back, which I knew I eventually would. So it was not without ulterior motive that I asked the man in the park, “Why would you stay with someone who treats you like that?”
The man reached around in his pockets nervously. I waited for him to say something simple and profound—something that only a man who’d slept on the streets could know.
“You smoke rock?” the man said.
He dug into his jeans, pulled out a little plastic baggie, a ball of tinfoil, and a straw wrapped in paper that said Sonic. He unfurled the foil, made a little pouch for the rock, and unwrapped the straw. “She broke my pipe,” he explained.
He lit the underside of the foil, took a pull from the straw, and blew the smoke from his mouth. The crack smelled like burned rubber.
He handed it to me. I followed his lead, and the little yellow-white rock bubbled black over the heat of the lighter. I pulled in through the straw, then watched the stringy smoke dribbling out my mouth. “Wow.”
The man laughed. “Right?”
The sounds of passing traffic and a train horn fizzled into a staticky hiss. I slumped down on the concrete and felt the heat of the high, the love of the high. I wanted to say something to the man, to express to him how okay everything was, but I couldn’t think of how to say it.
Then this sound started rising, growing like an approaching siren. A police car? No. The train? No. A dial tone. Like it was coming from the biggest phone in the world left off the biggest hook. My heart wasn’t beating right. My lungs weren’t breathing right. The tone died back down, until it was just coming from a regular-size phone, and I found my way to my feet. I staggered home, scared that the dial tone would grow. Scared of the sidewalk and the sky and every passing car. My skin itched, but not the good kind of itching like when you fell into a nice nod. I hurried up the stairs to my apartment and curled up on my couch.
The walls of my living room looked exactly as they had always looked, except that they hated me. The floor and the ceiling hated me. I told God that I would never get high again if he would just help me get through the night without dying.
* * *
I woke to wet sheets and jet lag. I was disoriented and sad without being able to touch the sadness. I opened the curtains to find a gray morning that felt much darker. I took a shower and tried to wash away the shame. I put on sweats and a hoodie and walked outside to the mailbox. An overnight envelope was waiting for me. Back in my apartment, I ripped it open, found a CD case inside, opened the CD case, removed a blank CD, and dumped out the four individually wrapped Suboxone strips that Kit had tucked under the disc. I tore open the wrapper to one of the strips, joylessly, and, instead of cutting it into quarters, stuck the whole thing under my tongue. I waited for thirty, forty minutes. The sweetish taste of the strip reminded me of itself. Then the heat swept in from the sides and pushed down, down, down. I got under the sheets. I wanted to talk to everyone I’d ever met. I should find my dad. I should call my ex. I should write to Alyssa. We could work it out. I could save her. Then I was gone, then back again. The sheets were so wonderful! Dreams kept interrupting. I was flying upward, trying to get out of the dream, but I couldn’t. I was banging on the ceiling, but it was concrete. I was screaming to someone, “Hey! Hey!”
And then I woke with a greedy gasp—like I needed all the air in the world and I didn’t care who I stole it from.
Lund, Sweden
Fall 2014
THREE THIRTY P.M. AND DARK outside. I lay in bed and watched the garbage roll across the courtyard as it did every time the wind blew in from Öresund. Despite my request for a Swedish dorm, I had been housed with the Lunds Universitet exchange students. Since the garbage room was organized into eleven categories of compost and recycling labeled in Swedish, none of the exchange students knew which bins were for food, which were for colored glass, and which were for used batteries, so they threw all their garbage in the “everything else” bin, and the garbage spilled out on all sides. Several fat crows lived on the overflow.
Anja lay next to me. She flinched as one of the crows squawked past my window. “Those are hooded crows,” she said. “They build poor nests.”
“Well, they’re living in garbage.”
“Even if they are not living in garbage, their nests are poor.” She turned around to face me. “Did you know that there is a type of female oriole that will not mate with the male until he has a nest she approves of? If she doesn’t like his nest, he’ll rip it up and build a new one until she’s happy.”
“If we were birds, I don’t think you would mate with me.”
She looked at my tiny dorm room. “Yes, I do not think so either.”
Anja was a German exchange student who lived two doors down from me and studied biology. She was twenty to my twenty-eight, undergraduate to my graduate, almost six feet tall, broad shouldered, broad hipped, and lovely faced, with long blond hair she wore in a thick braid. She was from the eastern part of Germany, near the Polish border, where, according to the internet, everything was cheap and the architecture was bad. I told her that I was from Los Angeles, rather than from a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, where the sidewalks were decorative and the apartments were carpeted.
We had just had sex for the first time. For the past few weeks Anja had wanted to wait, but this afternoon she had initiated it without warning. It had been terrifying, then lovely, then terrifying, then over. It had also been my first sober sex in almost seven years.
The relapse had culminated with my fainting in a Eugene pizza place in the middle of the day, waking to a bleeding forehead, and staggering away from the cries of the waitstaff and the approaching siren. Then there were weeks of white-knuckling it, as Duke would say, followed by Benadryl and cigarettes and meetings, meetings, meetings, capped by long nights on the couch where everything I watched made me cry—whether it was Law & Order, a basketball game, an insurance commercial, or a documentary about the history of public transportation.
The people at the meetings had always lived in so many cities: Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Boise, Denver, San Francisco, Eureka, Redding, Vegas, Medford. They said again and again that there was no such thing as a geographic cure. But they didn’t have a passport that granted access to the most drug-free country in the Western world.
When I had first floated to Duke the idea of moving to Sweden to stay clean, he had shaken his head and said, “You could score on Mars.”
But Sweden also offered citizens free tuition and student loans at a fixed interest rate of 0.6 percent. Since the plagiarism fiasco, I had been editing novels and memoirs for rich hobbyists, which had me leaving comments like Probably best not to compare yourself to a Holocaust survivor—but if you feel it’s necessary, I would cut the exclamation point. Even after my drug spending, I had a few thousand saved, and that plus the $300/month Swedish government stipend and $1,000/month student loan was more than enough to live on. I could spend two years working toward something: a master’s degree in literature.
I’d flown to Stockholm in August. It was the first time I’d entered the country since a visit at the age of fourteen. I’d stayed at my cousin’s apartment while he was away at his summer house in the archipelago and wandered through the sunny nights jealous of anyone who wasn’t alone. Then I’d taken the train down to Lund to move into my dorm, which was in the newer part of the city, east of the medieval city center. The dormitory was a four-story glass-and-plaster cube that looked like an ottoman/storage unit that you’d buy at IKEA. My room had a twin bed from IKEA. Also: a small stove, a sink, and a bathroom. The single
window looked out into the courtyard.
That afternoon, a cereal box cartwheeled by, chased by an orange cat the exchange students had named Mr. Cat. I wanted to tell Anja all the things I was feeling—how close I felt to her but how I wanted to scream because I wasn’t as close to her as I felt—but it was too much for the moment.
Instead I pointed at Mr. Cat. “Die Katze ist auf dem . . . courtyard.”
“Yes, it’s very good, Jonas.” She laughed. “But I never get to practice my Swedish.”
“Go ahead. Let’s hear some Swedish.”
She bit her lip, thinking. “Ett, två, tre.”
“And a one, two, three to you, too.”
“Hej! Läget?”
I laughed. “Not much. ’Sup with you?”
“Do not laugh! My Swedish is very good.”
“It’s the best.” I kissed her. “It’s because you have the best teacher. But these lessons aren’t free. Teach me something.”
“Okay.” She turned onto her side to face me and leaned on her elbow. “Do you know that a dead whale can explode just from being touched?”
“That’s not German.”
“It’s science. You’re very bad at science. When a whale dies, the gases build up inside of it, and then you touch it and it can just pssssshhh!”
“That sounds made-up.”
“It is not made-up. You are made-up.”
I couldn’t help but notice the absence of postcoital panic—the need to be alone that I’d always had to sneak pills to quiet. Lying there in bed, I felt happy. But I was also worried that the happiness would at any second disappear, either literally, with Anja leaving, or mentally, with whatever joy was floating around in my brain suddenly vanishing. This weird thing had started happening when Anja was around. These past few months in Sweden, I had been so uncomfortable—in Lund, in Swedish, in my body, my mind, and my sobriety. But when I saw her, I would pretend that I was comfortable so that she wouldn’t want to leave me. And then, without thinking about it, I’d realize I was comfortable. It was what had happened today, when she had shown up at my door, just as I was going through a list of reasons not to get high.
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