The sound of Johnnie’s laughter seemed to pull one of the dealers out of his self-absorption. He looked over at her, then back to Adrian.
“Don’t I know your friend there, luv?”
“I doubt it.”
“Isn’t that Roberto’s bitch I’m looking at. How’d she end up here?”
“Wrong girl,” said Adrian, standing.
“It’s a small, small, wee, wee world now, isn’t it luv, and that Roberto is absolutely a crazy fuck, now isn’t he? A big, bad bear,” the guy said, cackling.
“Fuck off,” Adrian said, and crossed the room.
She pulled up short when she saw the man sitting one over from Johanna, his sleeve rolled back, strapping his bicep with a length of surgical cord. Was this what they were doing! Centered on the floor between them on a breakfast tray were the needles, the candle, a blackened tablespoon, a snuff can holding a cache of bone-colored powder. Of all that she had seen in the city she had never seen this before; people she knew bragged they shot up, but not once had someone done it in front of her. She could only stare, fascinated and appalled—needles were nightmare instruments—nothing was more viscerally terrifying than having a dentist lean into your mouth with that gleaming filament of pain-tipped steel, its penetrating icy sting—but no one was dying, no one was winging out of control, no one was freaking. Just the opposite, like, zuck, peace, love, drool, googoo, an all-saints rodeo being held in the clouds. It caught her off guard, made her light-headed, her arms tingled, pushed a shard of anxiety from her lungs down toward her stomach. She crouched down behind Johanna, needing to know what her intentions were, did she intend to do this, abandon her, didn’t it matter that they were together, wasn’t there some small but necessary vow of loyalty between them? Whoa, girl, she prayed, more caution than plea because she was intrigued too, vice had its own piquant style, underworlds their sly dramaturgy, their covert plots. She wanted to watch, sit among the fiends and see what it was all about. People hunched forward like refugees, their heads lolling. The groans they made were like hums of sexual pleasure. She made herself believe she was being nonchalant and not intrusive. As she edged up closer to Johanna her skirt bunched in her lap and she felt a coolness ride up her thighs, the balding wretch across the circle from her had a generous view of her crotch but big deal, she could have been a nun on fire for all he noticed or cared. Johanna tilted her head back at a worshipful angle, as if she sensed Adrian’s nearness and expected her to whisper in her ear. She did: You’re not going to do this, are you? Shit. Johanna? But the needle was already home, jabbed in the crook of her elbow, the plunger nearly depressed to its limit, and Johanna, her face luminous, beatific, faultless and chaste, that trick of the demigoddess, put the emptied syringe back on the tray as if it were no more than a pencil she had borrowed, something to write her name in the air.
“God, you do this.”
Johanna scooted back away from the circle and slumped against the closest wall, Adrian crawling after her, demoralized and equally infuriated, wanting to excoriate this woman, flay her, for not abiding by their interdependence, a sisterhood of convenience if nothing more, wondering just what it was she was supposed to do now, to whom and what did she owe allegiance. The countenance of Johanna’s face was a cameo of expanding ecstasy. Her eyes rolled and then snagged into focus, rolled, snagged, trying to meet Adrian’s.
“Don’t be mad,” Johanna slurred. “You knew.”
“No, I didn’t,” Adrian whispered back primly.
“We knew where Sally was bringing us.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
There wasn’t going to be any more talk, and Adrian was loathe to hear herself anyway, prim and predictable. What a bad idea this was. Drugs were in competition with the other universal languages, the new Esperanto of experience. She refused to let anyone see how horrified she was by acting aggressively bored. She hated it that she felt left out, exclusion was the one feeling she couldn’t finesse, and so of course she became more and more resentful as she sat there, until her irritation began to suggest itself as a subterfuge, a way to delay the issue. She wanted to unstick herself from the modern gods, maybe, but she needed a hint, a telltale. Johanna gurgled in her perambulator and Adrian looked at her, the serene mush of her expression, and felt cheated; denied, at least. No one had even offered, as if she were labeled off limits or something. Like, she would have appreciated a little peer pressure.
“What’s it like?”
Johanna smiled behind closed eyes, opened her mouth to speak but didn’t say anything. “You Sexy Thing” played on obnoxiously for the twentieth or twenty-first or thirtieth time. She felt scared and absurdly unwanted, and to feel unwanted was a reckless form of instigation. She couldn’t stand listening to the human hush, Coddy’s place transformed into a chapel of self-initiation into blessed nullity. She caught herself examining her split ends and dropped her hands.
“I want to try it. What do I do?”
Johanna’s smile was incapable of change. She made gestures that were fragments of collusion. Sorry, she managed to say; she couldn’t move. Adrian tsked with intense frustration and scooted back over to the center of the circle, her mind made up. This was something you did once, like skydiving. Survival of the highest, Dionysian Darwinism. Who were the fittest for the pleasures of the nuclear age? Not just because it was outrageous but also so she would never have to listen to anybody’s shit about what it was and what it wasn’t. Knowledge that preempted fraudulence was always worth a risk, so you were never placed at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t like she was putting her soul up for auction. On the contrary, she had one self that was infallible, a wild, volatile core. She was a bit drunk and stoned already, not that she didn’t know what she was doing when she picked up one of the plastic-wrapped syringes and crossed the room to negotiate with one of the rock vipers, set her own rules.
“Hey,” she said to the one who had been a cover on Rolling Stone, how many years ago, “I have some of your albums.”
Last year like everybody else she liked disco, this year punk and reggae.
“Ah.”
“I used to listen to them when I was growing up.”
“Gar, what a contemptuous and brash child we are.”
“Not that I’ve listened to them in years, actually.”
“We don’t blame you, darling. Paleolithic.”
“Can you help me with this?”
He looked at her with his cadaverous eyes, considering. She noticed the phlebitis on the inside flesh of his arms and felt disgusted.
“As a gentleman,” he leered. “A gentleman’s duty and pleasure.”
“Yeah,” she leered back. He got up from the table and went with her, kneeling by her side over the tray on the floor. She watched him cook the powder, draw the liquid into its calibrated chamber.
“I hate needles.”
“You’ll love this one, luvie.” He took one of her arms and extended it, a connoisseur of veins, inspecting the dark channels that fed her body, caressing the skin with his callused fingertips. “Oh look what sweet and tender meat obeys,” he cooed mockingly. “We’re virgin, are we?”
“Absolutely vestal,” she said, trying to be flip but she had begun to tremble.
“Right. Let’s have a lovebirds’ stroll to the sink.”
“Why?”
“Why, to get to know one another, darling.”
“Why?” she persisted, getting up to follow after him.
“Foresight, luv. Some of us naughty children tend to feel a bit queasy for a second or two. We wouldn’t want to make messes for old Coddy, would we?”
“You mean I’m going to vomit? Nobody else did.” Her legs shook as he took her forearm in hand.
“Or not,” he said. “‘Tis nothing at all. But here’s Mr. Sink to receive whatever you can spare. I’ll bet many a poor bloke has cut off his bollocks for a nip of this heavenly body, what?” His grip on her arm turned cruel and intractable; she focused on the light of
his wedding band.
“Skin or in? Pop or sop?”
“What?” She kept her head down, through looking at him, his studied vileness.
“Mainline or sidetrack? Skin is Sunday service and main is storm troops.”
“Just take it easy,” she whispered, her courage wavering.
She swallowed hard and winced, watching the tip of the needle tented under her skin, the flower of blood drawn back into the chamber as the bastard hit the vein straight on, his version of the game. His thumb exerted slow and steady pressure on the plunger, letting it take forever. He stuck his face in hers so she could see his manic, menacing grin and he could see her register the velvet violation, the chemical phallus crushing into her.
“You know, luv,” he said, whispering himself, taking her into his confidence, “if you ever fucking well want this again from me, before you come begging you might show more respect for your elders who are also perhaps your betters, you can do this by dropping your pants to welcome a visit from old John Wank, who will fly up that dainty perfumed arsehole of yours till you howl awful bloody murder.”
Her quivering stopped, dissolved in a warm flood, an ineffable rushing current of power. “Probably not,” she answered him, barely able to speak. Her mouth watered instantaneously from the rising spin of nausea.
“Or not,” he agreed, withdrawing the needle and tossing it into the sink. “But do you know how to bloody fucking howl?” Stepping behind her, he aimed her over the basin and held her waist. “Give us a good one now. Steady.”
She felt the meltdown commence, the divine immanence that was also her stomach sliding up effortlessly as she retched onto beer cans—Susie at Sundown, Melanie in the Morning—and dirty plates.
“Atsa girl, the howl needs practice. What say, mates?” He turned her like a storefront dummy, modeling her for the tableside audience. A string of spittle dangled from her jaw. “Let’s put you back on the floor with the other angel and let you angels be. Would you say to be a bloody cunt is its own reward?”
She was insensate yet as he guided her across the room she knew his hand was beneath her skirt, clawing under her panties. Through the swaddling steam and imploding illumination of the drug she tried to bat it away but her equilibrium failed her and her arm was boneless when she swung, she might have fallen but then—she gasped at how brutish and sick he really was—he was supporting her weight with a finger driven into her ass, the nasty pressure was there and it should have hurt but it didn’t, even her shame was abstract and incidental, he was a lecherous swine and she didn’t care, he was nothing, the most profligate of satyrs, a ridiculous filthy worm, laughable—she laughed despite herself, girlishly, she was alarmed to hear—and she had ridiculed him, made him out to be the pathetic fool he was before she in effect gave herself over to him, choosing to be powerless like this, her life square in his demonic hands, but as long as she knew who she was it didn’t matter—really—and he was caged in the impotence of his own irrelevance. The finger was removed with a tearing suck of friction, she felt herself being lowered down like an invalid next to Johanna. With a final smutty smirk he dragged the guilty finger in front of her nose, forcing her to inhale the essence of her humiliation—Now you know what you are, luv; he was smut incarnate, barbarian manqué, a repository for recessive genes—but it was no longer conceivable to pay him any attention and then the putrid little sport was finished, he had exacted his revenge and left her alone, aloft in the syrupy amniotic sac of the heroin, a swirling like incipient convulsion swirling but never bursting and out of it leaked an ooze, rubbery and celestial, of orgasmic sap. Coins of pleasure lidding her eyes.
“You Sexy Thing” played for the hundredth or thousandth time. Adrian was half conscious of the fact that Johanna was speaking to her but the golden fatal abyss between them was too great to leap. She had to wait a little more. She wasn’t finished here in paradise reduced. She was still a gelatinous, absorbent being, dunked into a radioactive pool of rapturous felicity, it wasn’t easy to let it go, the most gorgeous feeling she had ever experienced. Nothing else came near, nothing approached its unlimited escalation of pleasure; even sex, by its brevity alone, and its clumsiness, physical and emotional, was a vastly inferior process. Finally someone had enough sense to enforce a ban on “You Sexy Thing”—it must have been Johanna, there was no one else she could see. The recovery of silence was important, its freshness was a reasonable transition, alerting her to the drug’s staleness, its lackluster wake as it passed onward toward extinction without her. She smiled weakly, watching Johanna loom before her, squatting back down.
“Did I wet my pants?”
“Say it again, I didn’t understand you.”
She did, concentrating on pushing the words forward with the tip of her heavy tongue, biting down with her loose jaw—everything that held her together now seemed dismayingly flaccid.
“I feel like I came so hard I peed on myself,” she said, weighed down by torpidity, a vaguely postcoital disorientation. “Like, there goes the dam.” She blinked slowly, straightened her legs and smoothed her skirt, feeling dull-edged, tired, and contrite. Did she need help standing? Johanna asked.
“No,” Adrian said, yawning, cotton-mouthed. “I don’t think so. Where is everybody?”
“Sally was here a while ago, checking on us. She’s very loving.” She had taken the auxiliary partiers with her when she left, more fuel for the central fete up at Lord Norton’s. Johanna went to the refrigerator and opened it, stood there gazing into its coffin of light. “You were still out of it, I guess.”
“The bad boys meet the bad girls. Are we in trouble? Are we damned?”
“Of course not. When in Rome. There’s nothing but beer ... would you like one?”
Adrian shuddered. “Jesus.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
Johanna’s spirit seemed to wane before Adrian’s eyes, she shut the fridge door and went right to the bed, crashing down, responding with weary, forlorn detachment. “Here I go again, setting a bad example.” Her cadence sounded spectral and overdone, as if she were speaking from beyond the pale. She swore she didn’t want to be on junk again, it was too much, too retrograde. “I need to be restrained, maybe.” She paused. Adrian felt her own nerve-endings cool down to normalcy. “You liked it?”
“I liked it so much I think I’ll never go anywhere near it again. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense,” said Johanna. “I was headed for this. I felt it all day, just out there, knowing it was going to happen. Don’t ask me why I don’t know better. I should. God, I should.”
Johanna seemed in no hurry to unpack her story from its psychic baggage and Adrian, suddenly desperate for a drink of water, wasn’t going to tease it out. She wasn’t so curious anyway, drugs made for lousy narrative. Standing up was like lifting a sack of sand. She wobbled toward the sink, latching on to furniture for balance. Is this an inner ear problem, she wondered, and then stifled a shriek, her blood running cold until she realized the face at the back screen was nothing more than the outline of a huge nocturnal moth, eye-shaped markings on its wings, but it served as a reminder, a note you stuck on a bulletin board near your phone: Don’t think you’re not vulnerable. The sink revolted her and made her recall the hostile anti-Svengali routine she had performed with what’s his name the wallowing star. Opening the faucet she was determined to wash it all away, poked unspeakable things down the drain with her finger and scrubbed herself up to the elbows with dish soap, ignoring the pinhead of sore redness where the needle had pricked her. She held her hair out of her face to duck her head to the stream of water, its tepid briny flavor only compounding the sourness in her mouth, the awful taste a barrier to the obvious head-clearing virtue of forgetting about what she had just done to herself. She found where she had put her overnight bag and brushed her teeth. Johanna stared at the roof, humming oblique snatches of something heartsick.
“Do you want to go over to the fete now?”
Johanna asked.
“I don’t know,” Adrian replied, but the truth was she felt sated, needing to nest for a while, recoup, decide if anything had changed thanks to her discovery of a place where there resided not the slightest vestige of pain, its possibility, or even its foreshadowing, a stop-time place of all-embracing and continuous pleasure in terrifying proximity—God, it sounded so histrionic but she couldn’t help that—to death. The solitary emptiness of everything was tranquilizing and seemed to call for undisturbed introspection, everything handled with care, or else they’d end up lost. The moth was still there on the screen, as if it meant to heighten her sensitivity to the watchfulness inherent in a world gone suddenly quiet.
“What about you? What time is it?”
“Past two.”
“I think I’d rather not.”
Johanna didn’t answer but made an ambiguous gesture, spreading her hands out toward the sides of the bed—was she offering benediction or practicing being crucified?—and Adrian told her she had to pee and was going outside.
Something had happened to the planet while she had been inside, it had come closer to a magnificent threshold that she only now saw and only now acknowledged, rather than slip past with the pretense of acknowledgment as she had done so many times in the past, being a person overdefined by the city, a woman who thrived on citylife and resonated to cityscape, someone trained to believe the true home of myths were media—paint, words, plastic, image—that progress was the only natural dynamic worth one’s undivided attention, that only art was without boundaries and therefore the only entity capable of mythic dimension, and she was not at all prepared for the elevated, olympian world she found on the other side of the door, startling in its precious stillness, newborn to her consciousness, undebauched and marvelous. Its expanse shimmered under a dome of honest stars, the harvest doubled or tripled beyond any sky’s she had known in the past, and outward, sharing her plane, the placid ocean like endless freedom, the most precarious of bounties, Lord deliver us from freedom, amen. She could hear fish come to the surface, tails slapping the interface. Tonight, here, she felt she was encountering the apotheosis of the physical world, passion purged of exotic relativity, its magic foundational, its purity undefiled, so that it made her wonder if another kind of life was possible, or perhaps even preferable. It was hers, all hers, she was alone in it, this exalted kingdom, Gaia, this miraculous earth. The hyperbolic sense of solitude was what crazy, desperate, psychically injured people felt in the city but here, no, here it was—Was this all the drug? she countered in a flash of cynicism. Chemically induced transcendence?—but it wasn’t, she knew that, the drug she took loved itself only and had no use for insights. She could attribute it to luck, being in the right place, your gates opened, the wild horses set free.
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