The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  “You’re looking good,” I tell her. She smiles, flashing us her new dental work.

  When she retreats, Lucien whispers, “can’t ever fix meth mouth.”

  Some of us laugh. Laura chucks him on the shoulder. It’s a sin, in the sacred texts of recovery, to maintain a hierarchy of addictions, but we at this table are all cloud users, and we can’t help it. We can’t totally set aside our feeling that we’ve got a little something special. Not like the cokeheads and the drunks don’t say the same about us, but still, we’ve got cloud sickness, with its unique lore and peculiar effects, and entre nous, we think we’re a class apart.

  Some people call cloud a memory drug. They call cloud sickness a memory sickness. There is a brief, euphoric amnesia, but what makes cloud different isn’t the forgetting. It’s what we learn in the interval between; what we hold onto when we return.

  In popular representations of addiction, the thing that gets short shrift is the gifts of the altered mind. I don’t mean in a Carlos Castaneda–hippie mystical sense. Fuck that. It’s something else, at least on cloud. A secret we cloud users share.

  Which we wouldn’t say in meetings, but in these little gatherings, we indulge in rumors, in giddy gossip that doesn’t quite fit the narrative of humility and regret we practice in church. Our talk about alternative therapies, for example, about shortcuts and quick fixes or the nasty way we describe all the people trying to kick it on their own—it’s not nice, but you do get sick of being nice.

  “Guy from my old crew shows up cloud sick, speaking the gibberish, whole thing. Has a stranger’s cat in a box. Do I want the cat? Obviously, I know, it’s his fucking cat. I take the thing in, give it Fancy Feast. Small enough favor. And two weeks later, he’s back. Where’s Frodo? I missed him so much. Tries to tell me he’s sober now. Some magic meditation practice with these rocks, no side effects.”

  “That OneLife shit?” Noreen, the oldest woman among us, says. “My niece did that shit. There’s supposedly—in real life—like sacred objects? Or places maybe? These magical stones help you target them and then you can walk away a changed person. Cost her five thousand bucks. What a scam.”

  “It didn’t work?” asks Laura.

  Noreen shrugs. “Something did. But you can’t just yoga and boom, the need is gone. There’s physiology. It lodges in your fat cells. Or in protein cells. One of them.”

  “Anyone who doesn’t get cloud sick,” I say, “didn’t really use in the first place. Sure, you take a hit a week, get you through dinner with the in-laws, fine. But if you are a day-to-day addict, you are going to end up in an alley eventually, not recognizing your own hands.”

  “I don’t know,” says the bald man next to N. I can’t remember his name, can’t quite resolve his features into a readable face, but he seeks me out at meetings, whatever, like there’s some long story behind us. Problem there, with a cloud history, is you don’t know if you were flinging your panties around a party when you met, sucking scum from the gutter. Maybe this guy and I, we met in a museum, talking about a painting, or maybe it’s just a mistake. Either way, he feels to me like the morning after a blackout, and so I’ve dodged his attempts to get friendly.

  “I don’t know,” says the guy again. “Enversion? The OneLife therapy? We all have those things, blank spots. Enversion says that inside those, briefly, our minds can be susceptible, plastic, like in an original cloud state.”

  Noreen is unconvinced. “A rock is not going to fix you. Getting clean is brutal. People die along the way. Love does. You won’t find a place where that’s not a fact.”

  Age is one of the things that earns respect in these circles. Noreen gets props just for having lived long enough that she looks as old as she is. She’s sixty, maybe, though looks can deceive. We all concede the point, even the bald guy who doesn’t agree, and then the table breaks into smaller conversations.

  Noreen takes my hand in her freckled one. I’ve ordered her favorite, sausage and onions, so she can nibble off my plate. She’s on disability, and she’s got the black coffee in front of her. “Hey, thirty days. That’s a big one.”

  “Thanks.” I say. “How goes it with you?”

  “You know. I’m still looking at those internet sites, Birthmother.com, Adoption Reunion. I’m saving for the deposit for the private investigator, but nothing new.”

  I pat her warm, dry hand. What we’re all talking around today is the shared experience of cloud. For each of us, something or someone has disappeared. It’s no metaphor. Noreen has lost her son, a boy she can remember at two, at fifteen, but whom she cannot track. Lucien does not know where he was born, country or year. No one can place his accent. Laura is missing a hand. N has less than any of us, barely a personality. Here’s our confession: inside the cloud, in that brief interval between forgetting and remembering, we have glimpsed possibility, a place of branching. The way we return is not the same way we entered. We come to believe we can ‘go to the right cloud.’ You’ll get high, and the path you take back from the memoryless place between will bring you around again. You’ll be the person you would have been without all the damage. And not just inside, abstractly: you’ll have the cat, the car, the child, the wife you would have had. Even now, sober and wiser, we all still believe this possibility is actual. You’ll eat cloud and—pop—you’ll arrive at this ideal self. A man you never married appears in your driveway, takes out his briefcase, and walks through the front door. Honey, I’m home. You would be pure, unadulterated, unadulted, everything as it would have been if you never ate your first spoon. We haven’t given up on the possibility. We’ve seen too much evidence, things flickering at the edges of our lives, little teasing promises idling outside our homes. But now, in recovery, we acknowledge that such chances were always lottery-small and that there are terrible risks in trying: your remaining hand, your name, whatever by getting sober you have managed to keep. Your baby daughter, even.

  “We have to live in the likely world.”

  This is why we have learned to pray only for modest miracles, why we place our faith in magical rocks or weekly meetings or the kismet of a late-night search result that will bring us something, enough, to keep going. The man in the driveway, that’s who I’m thinking of.

  No one knows fuck all about what cloud does to a person after twenty years of getting high. N, at the end of the table, for example, is holding his fork up to the light and examining it closely. N is a freelance data analyst—intelligent, functional—but there is simply not enough there. Sometimes, I think I am like that with Juni, missing something. Where did it go, the proper feeling I ought to have had that would have made me get clean in time? It’s not simply neurology, this missing part. Each bump of cloud is a branching. The people and things and knowledge we’ve lost at these choice points cease to exist. There are sisters, babies, skills, and even selves that evaporate in cloud. Our dim memories, our seemingly misplaced recognitions, are all that remain of what once was.

  The man in my driveway. In some other narrative, maybe, he and I saved each other, or never got high in the first place. And so, I can barely resist the longing to have him, my missing person, return. That’s my confession, what I could not tell Emily, what I can now barely admit to myself. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean he’s a friend to me. He could be someone else entirely.

  Now, the bald guy gently touches N’s arm. “It’s a fork,” the man tells N. “A tool for spearing food and sticking it into your mouth.”

  N nods, gives a grateful little smile, replaces the fork on the napkin, and asks his companion to repeat what he was saying again. It’s a project he’s making, a kind of personal history of cloud.

  “Topographical?” asks N.

  The man shakes his head. “It’s just parcel numbers, property lines. But I narrowed it down to a couple of places. Maybe there’s nothing there; maybe the thing inside is the story of my life.

  I get a box for the remaining half of my pizza and slide it to Noreen. We pay our meth
head waitress, scrape and stack our plates for her, leave a giant tip. Outside, we each head off in our different directions, to day treatment or welfare or supervised work release. I’m thinking about the bank, the post office, how many errands I can get in before I have to get Juni, when someone falls into step beside me. It’s the bald guy. He’s has been waiting for his chance.

  “Oh, hey,” I say.

  I side-eye him. I have a thing I can do, when I get the face blindness, where I look slant at someone, and then I can begin to assess. Truth to tell, he seems fairly non serial killer and even possibly kind of hot. But there’s the maybe-knowing him thing, and the fact that you’re not supposed to date in early sobriety. Besides, Emily tells me there’s a rumor about him, about him and women, that makes him not necessarily sketchy, but still off limits. She’s unclear, and either way, I’m not on the make. On the other hand, I am supposed to be making friends.

  “I’m so sorry—” I say. “I don’t remember your name?“

  “That happens a lot,” he says. He walks beside me, pacing his strides, not too close, correct, appropriate. Maybe he knows the gossip. Maybe he’s working especially hard to telegraph good guy.

  “I’m Mellie,” I say, doling out doses.

  “Yeah,” he says, like I should know that he knows that. “You got your chip.”

  “And you’ll be like, two years in July?”

  “September. This isn’t my first go, either. I had three years, once. And then I had a year.”

  “I’m a serial quitter, myself. Though, nothing like you. I think it’s the beginning I’m bad at.”

  “Right?” he says. “But thirty days. It’s good. It’s not the beginning anymore.”

  “You can’t just start from scratch, though. There are things that have to follow you into the new life.”

  He’s nodding. “Listen. I’m sorry if it’s too soon, but I have a question I’d like to ask you. It’s this project I’m doing, an audio documentary—”

  Suddenly, I get the bad feeling again, the history-between-us feeling. He takes a hand out of a pocket. It’s a device—not a phone. Some kind of recording device, I think. Which weirds me out. And then it’s worse than weird and I’m suddenly afraid.

  “What I’d like to ask is—” he begins again, but what comes next is sucked away. The world stutters. I get the sense of time dropping out, a block or two where I’ve just gone blank. The storm clouds seem dramatically darker, but there’s the man walking beside me like everything’s still normal.

  I pick him up at the edge of my field of vision, try to read his face. He’s not bald, I think. It’s—I don’t know. His head is shaven, or maybe he’s just got close-cropped hair. Maybe he has a normal haircut, and is just very blond—or maybe his hair is dark. I feel disoriented, like my vision is getting confused and maybe he’s not the person I thought he was. Maybe he’s been switched out.

  He pauses. We have reached his car. And now, I am on my highest frequency. I suck myself inward, and inward, and deeper inward until I am a tiny dense point, a universe of energy focused on that narrow view. He drives a black SUV. Rain begins to fall, catching on my eyes and blurring my vision. The Brookline street, the dog-walkers and the parking meter, the two after-school children tossing a ball, everything recedes. I blink. The car is spattered with mud, has boxes pressed up against the windows as if it has been lived out of. On the rear bumper, there is an oval sticker. It’s the same car, I think. It’s not the same.

  The man lights a cigarette, flame sputtering in the gathering downpour. I know the smell, the little Prince crown around the filter.

  “You’re him,” I say. “You’ve come back.”

  If they made a war on it, and funded longitudinal research about it, and started granting PhDs in it; if they put it in a particle accelerator; if they froze it below absolute zero and pummeled it with lasers and derived formulae about it, they would never prove what we know about cloud. What we who have indentured ourselves to cloud’s insight and greed know for sure. We know it in our bones and in our mouths. We whisper it to each other at the pizza shops and in the rehab centers and waiting to get our stomachs pumped in the emergency room.

  There are other lives we’ve led, intertwined with this one, and we’ve shifted, again and again. Perhaps cloud writes those realities; perhaps they preexist the cloud use and cloud merely lets us move among them. Regardless, the evidence is there.

  When you get clean, you’re stuck where you land. Your flawed memory of the life that has brought you to that moment becomes fixed, yours for good. But might there not also be unexpected consolations? Might some refugee from your best life still be here, and now, in some form? The thing might be waiting there, around some corner; it might be walking toward you right now.

  Four

  Brookline & Belmont & Boston

  1988

  My mom earns some money doing past life regressions. When I was little, like four, she took me off to New Mexico. We slipped out in the night, without much luggage and it was a secret. The trip must have been a first pass at her trying to leave my father, some stage in that long project which was eventually made moot by his leaving her instead. So, anyway, New Mexico. The true part of the story she came to tell is that she got lost. We got lost from each other. I spent a couple of hours waiting on the porch of a reservation store. There was this old dude in a cowboy hat who mistook me for a boy. The whole time my mom was missing, he kept me entertained—roughhouse, football, bottle after glass bottle of grape soda. I was all right. My mom, though, came back messed up: her lips almost black with dehydration, raving and hallucinatory.

  “I remember everything,” she whispered to me when we were back in the car. “Everything that ever happened to anyone.”

  From my later vantage, it seems like a lot of damage to do in a few hours, and I have to wonder if she ate some bad cactus, but that’s not the point. The point is something happened to her out there in the desert scrubland. She had some experience wandering among the red rock formations. It was more like maybe an encounter, and it was deep and it transformed her, so she says. It’s hard totally to pin her down on the topic, but I’ve picked up over the years that out in the wilderness, she met a guide, a young woman, and that this woman had a way of opening you up, a kind of mind trick called the On Elife. My mom will get that far into the story, then she’ll break off, like she fears she’s betrayed something important, will lose what magic she was granted. Anyway, New Mexico is why my mother takes clients. When she is between jobs, and when the checks from my father’s mother are late or get spent on my mother’s manic extravagances, we live by the fees from the regressions. In addition to the checks, also, my Russian-Jewish grandmother pays directly for summer camp and my tuition at the White School. This was arranged at the level of the court system, without my input and long ago, but consequence being I have always had rich friends and lived in a dump where I was afraid to bring them home.

  Nancy and me, it seems like an odd couple, but even when we were in seventh grade and obsessing over Guess? jeans and boy-girl birthday parties, Nancy didn’t care that there were roaches under our sink and that all of our potato chips were generic. One time, she left her retainer on our kitchen counter and when we came back, there was a bug just twitching its antennae on top of it. My mom tried to fix it by dropping the retainer in a pot of boiling water and it melted. I’ve had girls in my class stop being friends with me because I accidentally spit milk on them, but Nancy’s like, at a gut level, kind of fair about life and how it’s different for different people. Tow truck drivers, roaches on your retainer, Nancy is fine with whatever.

  At the moment, Nancy is standing in front of the fridge in our basement apartment. My grades are stuck up with a magnet. Nancy examines them, my straight As, with an A- in trig, before retreating into the bathroom. “Gross,” she says about my fall semester, my dumb priorities. I am the only one we hang out with who pays attention to my GPA, but Nancy says that’s just me giving adults po
wer. Nancy’s parents only care about her being a geneticist, but the closest Nancy gets to learning about science is how she studies the inside of her carburetor. She’ll never, ever get her PhD and that’s freed her somehow. My mother doesn’t want anything specific from me, not a particular future or career, but she’s greedy for my life in her own way.

  “Can I use the bathroom?” Nancy asks my mom.

  She’s arranging frozen fish sticks on a cookie sheet and drinking Tab. “Sure, of course. You’re always welcome.”

  I open the fridge. “I think we’re out of tartar sauce,” I tell my mom.

  “Would Nancy eat fish sticks with ketchup, do you think?” She’s whispering, like there’s some nicety to frozen fish, like if Nancy hears from the bathroom, it’ll be a catastrophe.

  “I doubt it,” I answer.

  “Shit,” says my mom. I can see she’s on the edge of tears, which is how it goes when she’s between jobs.

  I hand her a tissue. “She eats only salad and cookies, mom. It’s not personal.”

  My mom takes a breath. “OK. OK.”

  We’re leaving for the dance, the Belmont dance, after my mom gets some protein in us, and in the meantime, Nancy’s been trying to get my mom to read her past lives. Nancy is like that, serious about things like tarot that the rest of us do for a hobby. She used to spend her whole shifts at George’s Folly trying to cast spells and divine for water under Brookline Village.