The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Steve has been bringing me food. He says he might as well, because the guy on the other side of his room doesn’t do shit when he bangs on the wall. Tins of grey meat you open with a key, and day-old hamburger buns from the gospel mission. My left collarbone is broken and my face raw and taut with swelling. Bones float and snarl in my shoulder like an aluminum boat continually running aground, and I have had dizzy spells. Last week, I stumbled to the welfare office, picked up my cheque, saw my worker, Linda #103, told her everything was okay while she made her empathy face and told me I should go to the clinic. “I should,” I said, and staggered to the cheque-cashing place, returning home with a small fortune in Tylenol 3's and a tin of tobacco. The T-3's came from a guy I know who long ago convinced a doctor of his unbearable chronic pain, resulting in a bond I suspect is not dissimilar to love. I gave Steve some 3's for taking care of me and he took them all right away, hand to his open mouth, in a yawn.

  It’s a month later, I’ve been up for days trying to memorize the periodic table, and I’m so high my stomach is boiling. I sold the T-3's and bought some crack because I’ve found that it’s what best alleviates the pain and the dizziness, but now the crack is all gone and the reckless similarities between magnesium and manganese are beginning to make me want to dig my teeth out of my head like weeds. I’m watching my light bulb grow brighter and grinding my molars and wishing I had someone to apologize to. I guess it’s ironic that only when I’m really stoned do I feel optimistic and strong enough to never want to do it again. I’m telling myself that when I get my next cheque I’m going to get a big bag of weed and some groceries and just get healthy again.

  It’s morning, my room is a haze, I still haven’t slept, and I’m lying face down in bed listening to the inside-my-head sound of my eyelashes crunching into the pillow that reminds me of distant steps in snow. I’m fluttering them faster and faster, imagining someone running toward me, their breath steaming into the air, and suddenly I hear my fire escape rattle.

  I snap into a sitting position on the bed and there is a man at my window. He wears an old-style porkpie hat and a three-piece tweed suit, and is smoking a tailor-made cigarette that smells American. He grips the bars of my window as if he has been momentarily locked up for a petty misunderstanding and smiles warmly.

  “Hello, Henry, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

  The man’s speech is soft and melodic. His eyes are soothing and blue, lit by an inquisitive intensity. I recognize him from my science book.

  “I recognize you from my science book,” I say, my teeth chalky and soft from grinding.

  “Of course, Henry, and dare I say I recognize you as a fellow of the pursuit? Would you agree? And by ‘pursuit’ I refer to the intrepid and arduous quest for knowledge. Care for a cigarette?” His eyes linger on my science book as I tentatively snatch a smoke through the bars, unsure which of us I would describe as being inside.

  I find my hands are shaking as I light the smoke. I’m not used to tailor-mades and get panicked by the restriction of the filter as I wait for the drag in asthmatic anticipation. I exhale and begin to calm. His eyes flash as he speaks.

  “I feel it’s the best way for a man to buckle into some erudition—just a meagre room, a book, and some tobacco …” He is taking strangely long drags from his cigarette, and as he exhales, his eyes scan the room and land on the vials that once held my crack supply.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Oppenheimer, but—”

  “Call me J. Robert, what my students call me.”

  “I’m sorry, J. Robert, I mean thank you … but I’m pretty sure there are two dates under your picture in my textbook, or rather what I mean to say is that—”

  “I’m deceased? Throat cancer, unequivocally abhorrent, avoid it at all costs. Only truly evil things expand infinitely, my friend.” He grabs the bars and gingerly sticks his long, spindly legs through, then his arms, assuming the position I imagine would be most comfortable were one trapped in a giant birdcage. I can see his socks and they don’t match.

  “What’re you doing here, J. Robert, if you don’t mind me asking?” I mumble as he grips my eyes with his, brandishing the smile of a forgiving and benevolent parent. There is silence, he is still smiling and staring, I’m not sure if he heard me. He seems to be thinking.

  He smacks his lips and lifts his palms upward and out in a gesture of peace and his long arms sweep farther into the room than I would have imagined they could. “Look, I’m not concerned with the past; I can see by the shape of your face and shoulder you are not particularly interested in revisiting it either. I’m here to elucidate, provide guidance, this sort of thing. Do you have any questions so far?”

  My mind accelerates with a myriad of science-related questions, questions I’ve never had the chance to say out loud, and all of them seem too elementary for his finely tuned understanding. “Did you know the park out there is named after you?” I sputter, my clamping jaw carving jagged chunks out of my syllables.

  “Ha. Of course it’s not, Henry, it’s named after Vancouver’s ghastly and colitic imp of a second mayor, David Oppenheimer—no relation. Why would they name it after me?” He lights up his third cigarette in one mechanical motion and blows more smoke into my room.

  “Everybody around here thinks it is,” I say. “Regardless, your question is churlish and time is precious, so moving on, I will cut to it …” He clears his throat.

  “In my humble opinion it is not possible to be a scientist unless you think it is of the highest value to share your knowledge. Would you agree?”

  “Yes,” I say, still wondering if churlish is bad.

  J. Robert’s eyes again find my empty crack vials. “And accepting this axiom you must agree as a scientist that it is invariably good to learn, that knowledge is good. Yes?”

  I nod.

  “Do you truly believe that?”

  “Of course,” I say, sounding decisive and intelligent.

  “Excellent. So now we arrive at the crux of my proposal, Henry, and that crux being … In the spirit of scholarly inquiry, I hereby formally request your assistance in the procurement and consumption of the drug commonly referred to as crack cocaine.”

  “I have no money.” It is the first thing I can think of; next is wishing to have denied ever smoking it.

  “Aha! A pragmatist! Of course I have more than adequate funds to suffice for our purposes; think of it as our research grant, and when I say ‘our,’ Henry, I am illuminating the fact that you will be an equal participant in the inhalation of the psychoactive substance in question.”

  I say nothing. His eyes are so kind and forgiving, they make me want to turn around and see if they are actually meant for someone behind me.

  Method

  Although he is too foreign-seeming and well dressed to be a cop, J. Robert’s eagerness and complex questions put the dealers off. However, even when turning him down, they treat him with more respect than they ever did me, calling him sir, and one of them going so far as to ask why such a fine gentleman would want to get high with a goof like me. Finally, after promising to report all details of the experience, I convince J. Robert to stay back while I complete a transaction. The man is impressed by my large request and American money and says he is from Seattle and is just selling to get home. He stuffs J. Robert’s money into his jeans before telling me he has to go pick up more vials because he doesn’t have that much on him. I follow him nervously with J. Robert trailing a block behind. He leads us to a rooming house and I wait for a minute while he runs upstairs. I don’t have to find out what J. Robert would do to me if I got burned for his money because the man returns with a plastic bag rattling with vials, and I act like the whole thing was no big deal.

  The sun is out and fluffy clouds bump together in the sky above the park. Clouds are glorified smoke. My days are defined and determined by the comings and goings of various types of smoke. We are walking briskly now, J. Robert slightly ahead of me. We come upon an old drunk woman lying at the ed
ge of the park, passed out before she could reach its boundary, pickled in the sour jar of her body. I get a whiff of mouthwash vapour, strangely sweet and ironically fresh. Her mouth is loose and open, jaw pushed slightly forward, like she is concentrating on something fragile and complicated. “Alcohol evaporates faster than water,” I say, but J. Robert is too far ahead to hear me. It’s as if this woman is sublimating, I think, solid straight to gas, her life’s horrid memories fuming from her rubbery ears. I tighten my grip on the bag of vials and quicken my pace.

  He tosses his suit jacket over my TV, unbuttons his sleeves, and shoves them up his arms. “Your apartment is significantly smaller from the inside, Henry.” This is the longest I have ever gone between buying rock and smoking it. He rubs his hands together, sits cross-legged on my mattress. “Teach me everything,” he says, “everything you know.”

  As I’m laying out our supplies—pipes, steel wool, lighters, mouthpieces—it starts to rain. It feels as if the room’s air is being sucked through the bars out the window and up into the churning clouds, and I feel cold. I explain the entire process to J. Robert, savouring the details, making it sound as complicated as possible. He studies my face, sometimes moving his lips along with me as I talk.

  He raises the pipe and his hands are shaking.

  “Like I said now, don’t scorch it.”

  I can’t believe I’m telling a genius to be careful. He does a good job melting it and starts to get a toke, but he lowers the pipe trying to watch the rock burn and the liquefied crack dribbles out the end into his lap.

  “Goddamn it!” he says with an intense and boyish concentration.

  I start coaching, “Don’t stop! Keep smoking it, tip it up, that’s it, now inhale—go go go go …”

  He brings it back to his lips, musters a pretty good one, but blows it out too early.

  “I don’t feel anything, Henry. Goddamn it, show me properly, you buffoon!”

  “Here,” I say, blowing on the scorched pipe to cool it down. I load another rock, cook it, take a big hoot, then hold it to his lips and he fills his lungs. He holds it, blows it out, and shivers. His porkpie hat is tipped back like a newspaperman and his forehead is varnished with sweat.

  “That was the one, Henry … Oh yes … I’m getting the picture.” He closes his eyes and leans back on my bed. “I’m experiencing the prologue of an extremely pleasurable sensation now—differing vastly from what I imagined, however, but quite promising.”

  I help him smoke more rocks. Then he starts chain-smoking cigarettes, pacing the limited circumference of my room.

  “It’s no secret I’m a vastly superior theoretician than experimentalist; this is a reality I have always accepted.” I can’t imagine how deeply he is thinking.

  “Oh, Henry, without your steady hand, your know-how, I would be a stranger to these marvellous sensations. I feel such a marked increase in self-control, vigorous and capable of productive work.”

  “I’m glad I could help,” I say.

  He kneels beside me. “Henceforth, I shall refer to you as ‘Hank,’ because, Hank, I propose you just keep on doing what you do best, hitting those little delectable balls out of the park for me just like Hank Aaron smacking his home runs. Hey, old man? We can be partners. What do you say?”

  “Okay,” I say, “partners.”

  Either he or I wants to smoke another. So we smoke another. Then he begins a series of brisk jumping jacks in the centre of my room.

  “Christ, a man with your kind of prowess, Hank, we could’ve really used you at Los Alamos. Just imagine it: the world’s greatest intellects, working together in seclusion, a truly cooperative effort to stop the greatest evil mankind has ever known, nature’s deepest secrets unfurling before us like the desert mesas.”

  J. Robert is grunting with exertion and the rain is making the trees outside tell him to sssshshhhhh.

  He finishes, which serves as a good reason to smoke another.

  “We could’ve had a building erected specifically for ingestion; this substance would have tripled both creativity and productivity. A sizable supply could have been requisitioned, and of course rationed and distributed equally. Oh, we would have had a functional device years earlier, we could have vaporized Berlin as soon as Hitler jumped a border, for Christ’s sake. Hank, I once tired of your platitudes; now I see you for who you are: a great probing and unflinching mind, steadfast and brilliant, but yet modestly so; not a pompous blowhard of pseudo-academic tripe, but a scientist, in the most unmitigated sense of the word.”

  I can’t believe what he is saying; my throat burns and I feel like I’m going to cry. I stand up and start telling him about some experiments I’ve been performing and start moving my hands dramatically like he does as I talk, and I’m explaining about how I have always felt I was born in the wrong time in history and about if I just maybe had a chance to meet some peers or like he said some fellow scientists with similar interests, and now that he is here … Suddenly there is a bang on the wall. It’s Steve.

  J. Robert comes with me. We are companions. Steve’s door is open and we find him nodding out on his bed with his legs splayed in front of his frail body, semi-conscious, his head drifting downward toward his feet. I shake him and he comes around.

  Steve whines something about his high being ruined. J. Robert introduces himself and immediately offers Steve some crack, offending him deeply.

  “I don’t smoke that shit, Bob, it don’t do nothing for me. And as far as I can tell the sorry people who really like it, I mean the people who really get it in their blood, are the ones who already hate themselves the most.”

  His eyes are rolling back in his head, and he is speaking completely through his nose as if it were a kazoo. “That’s why I shoot dope, because I’m selfish, because I treasure myself. And I just don’t mind that self feeling like it’s floating in a warm sea of warm tongues every single minute for the rest of its life, that’s all. Is it so awful, Bob? My advice is you leave my crackerjack friend here out of your—”

  J. Robert’s voice booms theatrically. “Sir, I must ask you to hold your tongue! Treasure yourself? How asinine! It’s philistines like you who cloud the great minds of our nations with your rhetoric of self-worship. This crack cocaine unleashes the truest and noblest potentials in our society! And furthermore …,” but he leaves it because Steve has nodded off again, and this time I don’t wake him up. I’m just glad he knows so little of science; if he doesn’t recognize J. Robert he can’t rat him out. Rat him out to whom I’m not sure.

  Back in my room, J. Robert’s fuming anger is transforming into a sort of agitated sadness. I think it is probably also due to the fact that he is starting to come down, but I don’t tell him. He comments on the naked futility of existence, on the mercilessness of my light bulb, and then says something in what I think is Dutch. The rain has stopped. Luckily, he wants to smoke more rock, which is good because I do too.

  “What made you want to smoke crack in the first place?” I say.

  “Excellent question. Because, Hank, to have a sound and crystallized view on something, I feel one must experience it firsthand—to know what one is talking about, that is—and this crack just seems like an area I should form an opinion on.”

  I notice sweat stains forming in the armpits of his crisp white Oxford shirt. I want desperately to pick up where we left off, before we were interrupted, eager for him to listen to some more of my theories.

  “You know, J. Robert, these pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes.”

  “Simple physics,” he says. “Ordinary glass would shatter if subjected to this type of treatment, just like us, huh, Hank? Steeled by the girders of inquiry and knowledge!” He shakes my shoulder and it stabs me with pain, but I don’t tell him to stop.

  The scientific conversation doesn’t last. J. Robert has loosened his tie and is pacing and anxious; he wants to go outside, see the sights, meet the locals, get some air, and of course buy more crack. I fear J. Robert
will forget about me if we leave, or that he will disappear and never come back. I tell him we have more than enough to last us the night, and that this neighbourhood is ugly and dangerous and unscientific and we should just stay here and just smoke and talk. He snatches his jacket, begins stuffing his pockets with vials. “Hank, my colleagues call me Oppie. And Oppie is not going to tell you what to do, but Oppie and his narcotics are going outside, into this night—this night whose force shall break, blow, burn, and make us new!”

  Results

  I was twenty-six when I first smoked crack. Crack. It sounds so ridiculous even when I say it now, so pornographic. I started late in relation to most. I’d just moved to Vancouver, like everybody else. I was at a party I’d overheard some people talking about that afternoon at a coffee shop. Right when I got there, a girl I didn’t know asked me if she could borrow some money. I asked her what for but she wouldn’t say. I told her whatever it was I would like to be in on it. I was drunk. I didn’t think I would have sex with her but I guess I hoped.

  After the first glorious toke, I calmly asked how much of it was hers and how much of it was mine, took my share, and left. I fumbled through the dim rooms of the party and out the door, deciding to smoke rock forever.

  It’s still forever and we are wandering the streets at the mercy of Oppie’s arbitrary fancies. He is oblivious to traffic or fatigue and often breaks spontaneously into a run. I give chase and am barely successful in my effort to stay with him. When I do catch up, he puts his arm on my shoulder, breathing heavily. He seems surprised to see me and tells me he’s glad I’m here.

  The pavement is wet and reptilian, the air thick with evaporation. People are out tonight, like every night, hustling, smoking, chatting, shaking hands, screaming. Everybody is buying, selling, or collecting things of certain or possible value. Oppie is smiling and saying hello to random people, handing out cigarettes and American change to any and all who ask.