The Likely World
Page 16
“And Davos is the—the one being honest or whatever? Is he doing the talking?”
Paul smiles a smile which is perfectly, naturally blank, as if he is recalling some bland amusement. It is a church picnic smile, a smile for a win at croquet. Still, I see the shimmer of some other expression, something not nice before it evaporates. “Fucked if I know.”
“The whole thing sounds awful.”
“Maybe. I got thrown off the train after,” he rubs his sling. “Fracture. I’ll get over it. But also, the point is, the exercise worked, did something besides idle damage. The horror was momentary. We stayed friends. And the play, after performing for all those shit audiences, it was getting stale. Davos said whatever thing was wrong with me, I jumped off the moving train, and then the play was—if not fixed, then better, fresher again. The one Moscow performance was amazing. From the game, what stayed with you wasn’t the cruelties, but this knowledge about people, about the other people in the cast, that we are all full of judgment, that we are all making each other crazy all the time, and that none of us is special or weird.”
“Explain the part about jumping off the train?”
Paul shakes his head. “Thrown off. Jumped. I have an image left of the ground coming toward me. I guess we were pretty close to a station or the train got stopped or something because I was put back on. But it was painful and we were still a full day’s travel from medical care. I do remember that, lying on the bunk chewing someone’s Tylenol and willing time and the pain to pass.” Paul pulls on one of my sweaters. It’s a feminine cut, blue, and it looks terrific on him. Jesus Christ. Paul in a blue sweater. I’m done for.
Paul leans back against my two propped pillows. “Davos says you have to rip things open and see the guts before you know what you’re dealing with. Theater is about being willing to expose yourself at the level of organs. We showed him ourselves on the train, and he made the play new and I guess I believe a little pain and forgetting is worth it.”
I want to tell Paul that that might be so for the stage manager, for the tutu boy Ned whose role Paul took, or for Nadine with the boobs and the bush, but that Paul needs protecting. I see the line of dirt along his shoulder blade where the sling has rubbed away. He can’t reach it, with his fractured arm, to keep it clean. He needs someone looking after him.
“Plus,” says Paul, “I got the lead.”
The dorm phone rings. My dealer has arrived. Paul reaches for a towel and I tell the doorman to sign our cloud in. I buy a one-off, trying to look like less of a junkie, and act surprised at the price. The dealer, who knows me, gives me a benevolent smile. He’s never seen me buy with someone else in the room, and you know, your dealer is sometimes happy for you, sometimes spares you an idly generous thought.
I hand Paul his spoon, and he slowly unsticks the paper. I watch. Maybe Paul and me couldn’t have happened before. Maybe I needed to toughen or he needed to soften or we both needed cloud to sand the past into something more finished. Maybe, I think, Paul and me hasn’t happened at all and this is just some night, like the nights he spent with Nancy, that we’ll all ignore tomorrow.
“Stop it,” Paul says, laying his spoon on his tongue. “Don’t get emotional, Mellie.”
Oblako is the perfect name for cloud, better than cloud in fact because of the way it recalls obliterate and blacken and blotto. I watch Paul’s eyes, his beautiful eyes which are ringed with the black-green color of an old bruise. What is inside them? For the moment, he still retains the memory of what has occurred between us. I intuit a little regret, a little involuntary lingering heat. He shows some kindness and some disdain and a mess of things that don’t have names in English. Friendship is there. There is surprise.
“Admit something,” I say. I see the cloud washing through him, rising in the blood. I see it in a fading or flattening of his gaze.
“What?”
“I’m pretty good in bed, right?”
Paul shakes his head. It’s a friend move, the restraining hand on the shoulder of your homey, wingman gesture when your bro is about to make a fool of himself. “Mellie,” he says, confidentially. “You’re not still at the library researching for your opening arguments. Things evolve out here in the world. We don’t always get the thesis statement in the introduction.”
I want to ask him, because I’m still a baby inside, because I still have my babyfat belly, because I’m an itty bitty crybaby, I want to ask what Nancy’s thesis statement was. But Nancy is high school, Nancy is in another state, group encountering and extreme fasting; I make myself understand that I’ve already gotten what Paul’s going to offer before the cloud begins to take it all back, take back the good and the bad, before his eyes become oblako.
At last, Paul sleeps. It is four thirty-five and soon the morning will begin and the muezzin at the mosque will let forth the adhan.
Allahu akbar.
I open an email from Nancy. The time stamp is an hour earlier.
It’s mostly a rant. The retreat lady has decided rather than pay them, she is going to make them apprentices and put them through a training. Andi feels like it’s worth it, a fair trade, that she’s already made progress, spiritually. Maybe, says Nancy. But if you’re not getting a paycheck, it’s still exploitation, still basically indentured servitude. Plus, she suspects that Andi’s idea of fixing herself involves continuing to get high, that someone in whose interest it is has been smuggling dope onto the health farm.
I was working in the greenhouse yesterday. There’s all this lead in the soil, from the paint on the barn, so we have to get the perennials out of the ground, and try to grow them in potting soil. Most of them die, and even the ones that live, the lead is still in them. I can smell it, like a handful of old pennies buried in the new dirt. Andi’s like that, is what I’m trying to say, with leaving her boyfriend.
There’s a thing here that reminds me of how we were during the building takeover. You’re like actually sitting in just some low-level bureaucrat’s office, like looking at his stupid honorary certificates and his awards of excellence, whatever, and eating the last mints from his mint tin and you convince yourself that by so doing you are saving actual lives. Actually, it ends up clogged toilets and everyone who was going to die dies anyway.
Mellie, we’re at this juncture—you, me, Andi, Paul. Remember that, like, sense I had? Of a danger? Picture you think you’re in a big room, but really it’s a little tiny one and it’s getting smaller. I know it’s not clear. It’s the best I can do.
I write back: Would you want me to tell you if you started getting weird? Here, too, for the record.
I look at the five remaining spoons, resting on my desk. Paul snores lightly. After the train through Siberia, after the fracture, he’d picked up a respiratory infection in the Russian clinic which had worsened on the Aeroflot plane home. I tuck the stash of spoons in Paul’s messenger bag and then I begin to meticulously clean the room. Here and there, under the shelf paper lining my bureau, taped to the top panel of my desk drawer & etc., I find spoons. Cloud doesn’t age well. After about three weeks, it hardens and cracks, and lots of people say that the chemical changes which occur as it ages render the substance toxic, or at least that it loses its potency. Old cloud certainly doesn’t taste good, but it still takes the edge off. You insure yourself against famine, when you use.
And what is cloud for, in my life? I am not on any train; no one is telling me things I can’t bear to hear. It’s just for something inside me, that comes when I don’t recognize my own reflection anymore. It comes when I climb into bed with someone whose money I need but whose kiss does not stir me. It’s for bad grades and the room I can’t clean and my sick grandmother and forgetting to call my mother. Once you know what cloud can do, it’s easy to keep passing your little sufferings along to it, the small failures and the enormous shames. Cloud helps, helps everything but for the moment, an ocean stirring in me, I think that cloud might not be as good a fix as the man snoring on my dorm room mattress.
Three
Quincy, MA
2010
Tonight, at the Quincy Independence House for Women and Families in Transition, we are celebrating the return of Marisa’s son, Rafael. We have coffee and Hawaiian Punch and a supermarket cake that says “Welcome Home.” It’s home enough, here. The son, an eleven-year-old who already wears size ten sneakers, has just cracked his first smile.
“That’s right,” says one of the Independence women. “He’s a little man now.”
I’m late to the celebration—Marisa’s legal aide lawyer has been fighting the courts for two months to get Rafael released into his mom’s custody. I’m late, but I catch some of the joy. Marisa’s younger daughter is an overweight kindergartener, who through the absurdities of the social service system, had never been taken away. The younger child has been ridiculously sweet with Juni, teaching her simple clapping games which Juni can approximate in a clumsy way. I am, for this reason, a pretty big fan of Marisa, her raunchy tattoos, and her Irish-decibel style of parenting.
“Oh, no he ain’t,” says Marisa, smothering her enormous middle schooler in a hug. “He’s my tiny baby.”
The OneLife staff monitors us from the edge of the common room, listening for a dirty lyric to come over the boom box speakers, for one of us to let slip a curse. They watch for touching: any form of physical contact, a fist bump, a chuck on the shoulder, we get written up. Three write-ups, we are kicked out. Even as a child, I never had to contend with this level of regulation, and there have been days, since I’ve been here, when I thought: it wouldn’t be so bad to order myself a Starbucks again, to buy some decongestant without a signed permission slip. In the next second, though, I’ll find myself sniffing the lemon-scented Dawn dish liquid, just to get an echo of a fix, and I’ll know I’m not ready for freedom.
Juni wriggles in my arms, “gong food Mama bawd flower,” and I let her squirm onto the floor, where she scoots over the tile to the toy basket in the corner.
“Come on,” Marisa says to me. “Have some friggin’ cake.”
I smile, sip my black coffee. The being watched, the rules, it’s a different story for the other residents, most of whom are on supervised release from MCI Framingham, are just excited to be able to wear an underwire bra and use a flat iron again.
“Where’d you say you’re from?” Marisa had asked, watching me clean the toilet earlier. “Wellesley, some shit?”
“We have a house in Roslindale.”
“Bet you moved there recent. Not like when Roslindale was Roslindale. But where’d you grow up, right?”
“Brookline,” I admit. You don’t get points with these women for basement apartments or infestations. There was the White School, and the checks from my grandmother. I had advantages.
“Brookline, huh?” She nods, like she knew it all along. Marisa’s the nicest of them. Some of the other residents lean on the Rs when they talk to me to parody my White School accent, my stubborn habit of scrawling down anything I want to remember. Here, it’s the counselors who take notes, who make decisions about whether you get to have a visitor pass or can move into a room with a window.
Still, the worst of Independence women, the dumbest and the meanest, still they knock me flat on the daily. The street hungers for these women’s return, sends them news of fatal overdoses and cousins locked up and little sisters pregnant, and all of it leads back to getting high; each day, these women lower to their knees their two hundred and fifty pounds (or ninety-five pounds or a hundred and eighty) and beg for strength and are granted it because they all love their kids more than anyone on the planet. It’s a love that’s been tested, that’s been brutally tested, and that’s what I’m trying to make rub off on me. I am lucky to celebrate among them.
The supervisor is looking at me now, giving me merits or demerits. It’s all couched in self-help language about growth and truth, but it gets down to a Pavlovian game of behavior and reward. There are a million tiny privileges here, window privileges and refrigerator privileges and hair drier privileges and porch privileges and telecom privileges and guest privileges. If I lose the drier time, I feel like a fuck-up, like I’m a shitty person who doesn’t even deserve to have dry hair. I care if I get to pick the cereal or open my window seven inches. I am suckered in by Juni, who is babbling more, making more word-like sounds, who is always in someone’s lap, or getting passed a piece of candy from a leopard-print purse. When she toddles off the rug and toward an open door, there is someone to yank her back. Emily was right: I need the help, still.
So now I watch the staff watch me and I do the stupid things for which I will get treats. I paste a smile on my face, and step into the tight circle around the refreshments, and have some friggin’ cake. It’s good, too, moist with preservatives, sharp with salt and sweet with frosting that is pure anhydrous dextrose and Crisco. I scoop Juni up from the scuffed tile and even dance a little bit to the music. None of these gestures feel organic to me, but I’m trying to do this properly, not to take shortcuts. Fake it till you make it, Emily would say, and I do. I fake my laughter and my small talk and my dance step until Juni saves me by being a kid. She starts to fuss, and then I can make my excuses, and allow myself to slip off to the one-room efficiency that Juni and I are living out of, the tiny space that has been for the last three weeks, our home.
It’s lonely, this life. My terrible secret is how lonely I am, even in the midst of so many people. Half the nights, I am so miserable, I wake myself up with the heartache. It is these hours, three in the morning, in a sterile room with only the sound of my sleeping toddler’s raspy breath, that I am most vulnerable to relapse. My longing isn’t general. In these moments, in the middle of the night, I can almost recall the person I desire. He is like the hard shape of something glued between two ancient pages. I slip my fingernail between them and then the desire slips into terror, the lemon lick of cloud. I want him back, and I am afraid to have him back. I cannot be trusted.
Night after night, this is where I arrive. The door to the facility is alarmed; the street outside dark and far from transit. But if these barriers were not in place, Wednesday, Sunday, any night would be reason enough. As it is, I clutch myself into a ball and I rock and I rock and I rock until morning comes and the baby begins to cough herself awake.
My particular therapist is a woman in her twenties who looks as though she’s gained and lost dramatic amounts of weight in her life, the folds of loose skin beneath her chin aging her. She wears a small, inexpensive diamond on her right hand. She does not have well cared-for teeth. In this morning’s session, I present her with the therapeutic drawings from my OneLife workbook and she flips through them attentively. I have complained to her about how twitchy I feel without my memory book, but she thinks it’s for the best. She hasn’t counseled many cloud users, and she’s been reading up. We have, she tells me, disjointed memories. But scribbling things down doesn’t provide healing. There are even data that suggest record-keeping can actually stall recovery, etch deeper the broken pathways of the brain. She wants me to rely on internal processes more to retain things.
“How’s it going with that?” she asks.
“I feel like my brain is going to fall out of my head.”
“It won’t,” she says.
> “We’ll see.”
“Memory, encoding, storage, retrieval,” says my therapist, “these functions are enormously complex, but we’re now fairly confident that in cloud users, the connection between social processing that happens in the amygdala and the retention of imagery that occurs in the temporal lobe is blocked. In a healthy brain, a familiar image—say, a face—triggers an associated set of social responses. In the cloud user, a stimulus can spark the emotions and senses, but the recognition function fails. On the one hand, a stranger may appear meaningful and beloved; on the other, an intimate can be completely recognizable, but the feelings that belong with that recognition simply do not trigger. Either one—recognition or meaning—can be cued, but something interferes with the link.”
“There’s no good data on cloud,” I tell her. “There haven’t been any longitudinal studies.”
“You keep saying that,” she tells me. “The science on cloud is terrific these days. The results are very solid.”
“Since when?”
“Since the NIH, the Hopkins study, the one just last summer out of Brigham and Women’s. Do you want to read the papers?”
I shake my head. I still can’t concentrate for more than twenty minutes on anything deeper than Goosebumps.
“There’s the face blindness, selective, which you’ve experienced, yes?”
I nod.
“The language muddle, obviously, word substitution, which lay people call cloud sickness. What else have you felt?”
“There’s this constant sense that I am just at the cusp, that I am on the verge of some revelation which never comes.”
“These are all consequences of faulty encoding. You take cloud, initially, to wash away a bad experience, correct? What we now think is that this erasure is actually singular, an area of the brain which operates like a stutter or a skip into which new experiences get tracked and retracked. The experience you may have, of having connected to different lives, is an after image of this trough of forgetting. I don’t need you to accept this, just now. But memory is really always rememory. It’s always ground gone over, and over. So each time you pencil in some severed thing, you may in fact be deepening this area of detachment. Can you imagine that your record-keeping might in fact be inscribing your memory troubles?”