The exact mechanism of action of PROVIGIL is unclear, although numerous studies have shown it to increase the levels of various monoamines, namely: dopamine in the striatum and nucleus accumbens; noradrenaline in the hypothalamus and ventrolateral preoptic nucleus; and serotonin in the amygdala and frontal cortex. While the coadministration of a dopamine antagonist is known to decrease the stimulant effect of amphetamine, it does not entirely negate the wakefulness-promoting actions of PROVIGIL. This is not by any means the whole story.
Sabater Pi stands over his engrams and mutters incantations. These incantations are the stuff of ice creams, through which the world learns its manners. Without Sabater Pi’s engrams, the world would have no memory. He decides which to keep and which to discard. It’s a very important job. It might be the only important job. Sabater Pi had just decided that the engram of the dead girl in Writer’s room must at all costs be kept. Could not for any reason be removed. He walked to a corner of his office, sat down at a comically small desk, and began typing.
Writer was startled by the sudden whir and clunk of the fax machine on the floor by his feet. He remembered that the Icelandic magician Flute Guðmundsdottir had once told him that her magic was meant to represent or emulate the sound of the modern world, its electronic machinery in constant motion, humming and buzzing and belling in the background even when no one was listening. This had never made any sense to Writer. He had tried to discuss the issue with Bragi Ólafsson, an Icelandic novelist who had once helped out in Sykurmolarnir, which was the name of a circus act in which Flute had also participated, doing—something. But Writer’s attempt to reach Ólafsson through his American publisher had been unsuccessful, and so with some reluctance he had dropped the matter. Throughout his conversation with Flute, she had licked her lips repeatedly, small pink tongue darting out of her mouth to moisten this or that small section of unglossed upper or lower lip. It was a reflexive action. She wasn’t aware she was doing that, he remembered thinking. But also a familiar one. People who are nervous, or who take any form of stimulant, even coffee, are prone to this reflex. The stimulant produces a sensation of dryness in the mouth and lips that no amount of water can remedy. There would be no reason, Writer reasoned, for Flute to be nervous in his company, in room 59 of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California. She was drinking from a deep glass of still water. It was exactly noon o’clock.
The sound of the modern world scared the wits right out of Writer (whose real name was Thomas Early). The sound of the modern world was linked inextricably to the speed of the modern world. The latter was very, very fast, and getting faster. At—what’s the usual phrase—an “exponential rate.” One moment we’re all prosperous and happy, seals basking on the warm rocks of midday sun off the coast of Maine in summer. The next we’re falling, endlessly, down a hole that used to be a floor but is no longer a floor. The banking system had run out of money, as Thomas Early understood the situation, and so everyone had run out of money, and even though everyone had run out of money years and years ago, for some reason this now actually mattered. Hence the panicky tumble down the black hole of the future, end over end, bottom over top, will-ye nill-ye, and God help us if we ever reach any kind of definite denouement, because a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that an abrupt halt would result in a gelatinous mess.
The best we can hope for, then, in the current situation, is to keep falling. Even though it seems as if we’re falling faster and faster, we’re actually falling at the same speed. The speed of a falling object does not depend on its mass. That you are a (much) fatter person than me does not mean you will fall faster. We all started at the same height, from the same point, and Galileo has proved that we will all be crushed to death simultaneously.
We are aware of our many misdeeds, our failings, our weaknesses, our fears, our shame. We do not know how to exculpate ourselves. (Having no religion to rely on.) We do not know whether to exculpate ourselves, having no moral or philosophical base from which to extrude the principle of sin. Because we were brought up short. We were all brought up short in a long, tall world.
The dead girl’s mistake was indulging her appetite for existence. We all make the same mistake, and the mistake is always fatal. An eighty-three-year-old woman is in a coma after having been attacked at the Mairie de Clichy métro station by a fourteen-year-old Romanian kid. A former journalist was killed by his seventeen-year-old son because the son was unhappy with the five hundred euros per month his father was giving him as an allowance. A man found two thousand euros, cash, in the street. He turned it over to the police. A judge ruled that the two thousand euros does not belong to the man, and is instead being kept by the court until the real owner of the money can be determined. The man declared himself in an interview to be “disappointed” by the court’s ruling. “Honesty doesn’t pay,” he said.
Potter’s Field ain’t such a faraway stare when you’ve one foot in the quick. An argument between scholars, already tenuous, becomes untenably ephemeral within minutes if you put it in (a cloud). Unsearchable, unfindable, irretrievable. Lost. The most common side effect of speed is the acceleration of loss.
The fax from Sabater Pi was very short. It read, in full: The dead or dying girl is you.
JAMES GREER is the author of two novels: The Failure (Akashic, 2010); and Artificial Light (Little House on the Bowery/Akashic, 2006), which won a California Book Award for Best Debut Novel. He is also the author of the nonfiction book Guided By Voices: A Brief History (BlackCat/Grove, 2005), a biography about a band for which he once played bass guitar.
no matter how beautifully it stings
by william t. vollmann
Note to the Reader: The following passages have to do with speedy substances, which, like any loyal American, I know only in the most theoretical sense. —WTV
Her face was already smoother when he looked in the mirror. He thought it was the estrogen but Rosa said it was only autosuggestion. (He had a dream that he was walking with Rosa and everyone humiliated him; Rosa said it was because they could see, thanks to the crimson collar of the sweater he wore beneath his jacket, that he was a woman.) Often now he felt as lovely-pure as this transparent meth crystal now partially crumbled to glassy sand within the multiple-folded scrap of newspaper. He broke it in half. He inhaled. The septum of his nose ached. His nostrils watered. Then he began to feel the happy lively feeling; he was alive again, “in the moment” as we Californians say. His nipples itched.
Do you want any, darling?
No, thank you, said Rosa, doing her mascara.
His penis hardened delightfully. He saw everything better; he could practically count the revolutions of the fan blades on the ceiling; oh, he surely could have had he wanted to.
While Rosa glossed her lips, he had another sniff.
Rosa offered to do his makeup, but tonight he did not care to honor his inner feminine in any outer way; better to remain a double agent. So while Rosa combed out her Isabel wig he laid happily spreadeagled on the bed, with another shot of whiskey in his hand, playing with the gray hairs on his nipples, his penis hard like never before.
One was supposed to leave the room key at the office, but he put it in his pocket. They went downstairs to the rental car. Rosa was the driver and he the navigator. It was just dusk as they rolled out of Santa Monica past the motels on Ocean and the cool beads of traffic. The sting of crystal was delicious in his nostrils. It was going to keep him excited for all of the thousand miles down Santa Monica Boulevard to the Western girls and the blond California girls with net purses. His powers of perception may safely be defined as godlike, although I grant that later he could not always remember his observations. In traffic behind taxis he saw into every car, reading the emotions of all parties even when only the backs of their heads offered themselves to his discernment. As for Dolores, she spotted a man on a bench; she could have counted every hair on his hands. Two couples crossed the street, and to her this was unique and even important. A man and
a woman were kissing. Dolores got hot, and slid her big hand up Rosa’s skirt. But then as they crossed Fourth he was enraged rather than titillated to find a man put his hand on a brunette’s hips when he wanted to do it. Then the illuminated freeway became an intergalactic ride, and these were the constellations:
and the 405 freeway where the world was darkened by red lights. Rosa seemed a trifle disappointed in him, so he put on lipstick.
(the meth shining loyally in his being, the lights calm)
and high dark towers whose rectangular windows were usually yellow but sometimes silver gathered them in like the arms of a harbor or moonbase, the red blear of the Beverly Hilton promising them that their night could be as dirty, fun, or sinister as they cared to make it; and then it grew extremely dark on Wilshire Boulevard. This long grayish-white rectangular building over there against the dirty dark cubes, what would that have meant to anyone whose gaze had not been so enhanced by meth? And what did it mean? He knew, but what he knew he never told me, so I cannot put it into this book. His eyesight was getting keener by the instant. His best friend Luke used to have 20-10 vision, although now that was going away. Now he understood what it must have been like for Luke, this confidence and competence; and already they were crossing Rodeo Drive. Los Angeles was flat and white and cool.
He experienced a glowing feeling, deviled warm and deviled dark, but no, neither dark nor cool—perfectly at ease, with a faintly bitter taste in his mouth, his lipstick greasy—
(not to mention the glowing massage parlor on La Cienega, then Love Connection, Love Correction, Tasty Donuts, Crescent Heights Boulevard, Hollywood Electric Vacuum and Sewing, Paris House Nude Adults Only, Fat Burger—and then the velvet grid)
—and on Western a police car screamed by—
I want to go to Dr. Skin, he thought; but what if he’s creepy, and instead of improving my skin into womanly smoothness he skins me alive or turns me into a tattooed mummy?
They parked and went to a bar which had been recommended by an expert drinker named Mr. Joseph Mattson. It was called the Black Hole, and indeed it was a narrow, lightless place, deserving of the dark fumigation recommended by the fifteenth-century Book of Buried Pearls for those who wish to find the invisible pathway beneath the white mountain north of the Great Pyramid of Giza; here refined gold awaits the seeker who has escaped Dr. Skin. The little Japanese barmaid wore bigger breasts than Dolores. On the hot black stinking sticky walls, dancing girls had been painted in phosphorescently artificial hues. They could have been ancient terra-cotta Sirens from whose flesh the pigment was flaking. The black picnic tables were empty, but four men sat drinking quietly at the bar. It was almost Halloween. He sat down beside Rosa, gazing at a plastic jack-o’-lantern while they drank beer in plastic cups. Rosa laughingly said: I wonder why it is that the toilet seat is always up in the women’s room? Around midnight the T-girls began to swish in; he especially liked the long-haired girl in the snappy dress shaking her hair, acned rough face. On the black man’s lap, the white legs of two capering girls opened and closed, speaking to him like lips whose tongues were hiding. There was a curtain like a pair of nylon stockings, and it kept wavering and the busiest T-girl kept wavering through it in and out of the street, from which came another T-girl in a black skirt who took her by the hand and they went into the ladies’ room. Not all of them were tall; some little young ones reminded him of black ducks swimming and pecking in the green water. There was a woman whose eyes were so white in the darkness; Rosa also loved her, so that when they gazed at her together his heart became as blue and pure as her eyeliner. Rosa, seeing how shy he felt, rose and entered this woman’s golden screaming glow; she whispered into her ear, and the woman smiled, at which he began to glow at once, staring into her eyes. The woman accepted Rosa’s hand. They approached him.
What’s your name? she asked him.
Dolores, he replied. And yours?
Luz María Salcido.
Do you like the Black Hole?
Better than picking grapes all day in Coachella.
Soon they were in the woman’s apartment, playing with her cosmetics.
Just as a line or two of meth on the second day, no matter how beautifully it stings the nasal passages or even how well one has just slept, is never as thrillingly joyous as on the first—nasal secretions run down into the throat, bitter rather than salty; and the feeling with which one is presently gifted is no high, merely a sort of weary steadfastness, as if consciousness has squared its shoulders; then slowly, slowly, one comes to feel a trifle better, more wide awake, but impurely so, lacking well being—so Dolores, who had now become a woman to the best of her capabilities, now began to take herself for granted, feeling sometimes almost bored with her lips, anus, and nipples: I’m a woman, and who cares? Do I particularly care about my downstairs neighbor Adelina? Are whatever pieties her wrinkled old brain produces any more or less of a miracle than the fact that between her legs rides a dried-up gray-haired slit? Who am I to be impressed by her, myself, or anything? What I live is merely life, nothing better. Anyway, I don’t dislike Adelina; I’m even fond of myself; my life is quite fine in that way. What do I wish for? Is nothing better than sexual ecstasy, or self-love, or the love of others? Is boredom my failure or simply a requirement for not dying? I’m sweating with boredom! I don’t feel good. I must be getting old; I’m hot and achy. No, it must be the hormones, or perhaps some disease.
By degrees her customers had become peculiarly ungrateful, even insulting at times. But then she discovered something nearly as good as Concentrax, and possibly even better. They called it the green angel. It was a little pill, you see, a darling little pill, and whenever she took two, or at most three, then no matter whom she was with and whatever she did, she screamingly enjoyed herself. Sometimes the green angel even focused her mind so that she could remember any number of ways of being a woman, for instance a certain young girl, so shy, a whispering face-averter, who in the time when Dolores was still a man would gallop upon his face so freely, and just before she came would always whisper fuck!
A man was sodomizing Dolores, and she loved it. Oh, how she loved it with the deep joy and purity of desire fulfilled, the animal present triumphing over the deathly future … Wiggling her bottom for him, leaning on her elbows, she covered her eyes with both hands as if she felt extremely reserved, then suddenly drew her hands away, wiggled her bottom as rapidly as she could, and whispered fuck! The man was enchanted.
But soon afterward her big male hands began stinking of sweat; her aging face went red and ugly; she felt as if contaminated liquefied fat were oozing out of the bags under her eyes, her febrile forehead salty wet, her tongue and glottis tasting like metal. She blew her nose, and there were flecks of blood in the mucus. She grew more hot and nauseous by the instant. These unpleasant sensations seemed to have come from nowhere, but don’t they always? When she lay down, the granules of the popcorn ceiling refused to stop enlarging themselves. She closed her eyes, but her eyelids hurt her aching eyeballs, which sweated and sweltered in that too-hot darkness. Her face seemed to feel better when she locked it into a grimace. Why was that? She couldn’t think. When would this go away? It was the third day since she had last inhaled a line of crystal. The sweat on the backs of her hands and between her fingers afflicted her almost intolerably. It felt gummy and corrosive at the same time. She wished to lie perfectly still on her back in a cool dim room. With considerable fortitude she managed to take a shower. Then she put on a clean loose dress and lay down. Instantly she could smell the stench of her armpits, which she had cleaned many times with a bar of stinging soap. The sweat on her upper lip stung almost intolerably. Sores broke out on her tongue. Twin crescent zones of hideous sweat erupted beneath her eyebrows, whose fine, almost imperceptible hairs exuded foulness. Her heart was beating very rapidly. The hairs on the backs of her arms began to sting. In her breastbone, a wide hot oval of tenderness now manifested itself, not entirely unpleasantly. Dolores lay as motionless
as she could, waiting for these symptoms to pass. Now it was the backs of her wrists which felt the hottest and wettest. The insides of her elbows stung numbly. Her dress clung to her flesh like the burning poison shirt of Nessus. Her back ached. Each bone within her fingers threatened to shatter. She wanted to wipe away the sweat on her upper lip, but feared that the side of her hand might adhere there. She would have used yesterday’s panties, which lay on the floor beside her, but although she could see them, she could not reach them. How hot it was here, how impure! She could not escape from feculence.
The next day the withdrawal afflicted her only in throbbing nauseating wavelets, and the day after that she was perfect. Now she knew how to manage crystal: once a week would be best. For the other times there were Concentraxes, powder-trains of cocaine snuffed up through twenty-peso bills, crack rocks, tequila, beer, whiskey, and, of course, the green angel. The trick was to parcel out these various vitamins and staples, so that no single one could bite too deep. When all else failed, and certainly when anything succeeded, there remained orgasm itself.
The Speed Chronicles Page 17