A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  “I WAS TALKING to Gregory last night,” Reina mentioned the next morning. He’d left early with his wolf and his wand, like a recurring character in a story where archetypal healers show up with symbols of their craft, deliver messages hidden in riddles, and leave at dawn in the company of beasts.

  “What did he have to say?” I inquired, as neutrally as I could. They’d sounded like they were moving furniture all night, so I was surprised to learn that things had taken a conversational turn.

  “He just asked some interesting questions.” She looked out at the lawn. “Did I tell you Zack used to mow that whole thing? In slacks and a button-up shirt? It’s about two acres.” She turned away impatiently, as if the recital were some boring thing her maiden auntie used to tell her all the time.

  “Dani’s mom has a saying,” she began again. She spun her heavy clay mug slowly in her hands, so the cream made lazy swirls in the thick black coffee. “She says a house is not a home.” She eyed the manzanita railings. “Until there’s been a birth, a death, and a wedding in it.”

  Her gaze lingered on a photograph of her wedding day at Foxglove, gleaming in its frame above the fossil mantle. The laughing couple was wrapped in an Indian blanket. Reina, six feet tall in red cowboy boots, nestled into his craggy old shoulder like a soft little nestling cuddling her mate and protector.

  “I guess I’m two thirds of the way there,” she observed, and took her coffee upstairs.

  A Silver Wedding Ring

  A Spider Plant

  THE SEASON PROGRESSED at Serendipity Organics. We hung the pot under the house, where we discovered the emotionally damaged cat had been hoarding dozens of small half-eaten rodent carcasses. We lost a lot of enthusiasm for the cat that season.

  There was very little enthusiasm for anything at Serendipity that year. The mood in Mendocino County is heavily influenced by the seasons, as in any agricultural economy. Here, the paranoia reaches levels of ecstatic jubilation around the end of August. The plants are almost ready for harvest then, and they stay almost ready for a long, dangerous time when days are hot and idle, there is no more work to be done, and nobody has any money. People get restless in the long cicada days of waiting and the short, chirping nights of the same. Minor breaches of etiquette take on heightened levels of significance. Unmarked planes swoop lowest and oftenest then, like hyenas skirting the herd when the young are about to be born. The end of summer is a very bad time to go hang gliding in Mendocino County.

  By mid-October, everyone is too busy harvesting and cleaning weed to indulge in a good bout of antisocial behavior. The pot harvest is Northern California’s finest argument in favor of the mental health benefits of productive activity.

  But at Serendipity Organics, there was a sense that everyone had just gotten sick of averting disaster. The water ran out and nobody cared. “The rain will come soon,” Alizarin promised. One of the dogs tore the hamstrings out of a sheep, and the creature stood blinking until another dog finished it off, at a leisurely, methodical pace. “How horrible,” Alizarin observed, before drifting away to sprinkle fish meal on the hollyhocks.

  Things came into focus while hanging pot with Morpheus under the house. Alizarin was in the kitchen, over-indulging in trail mix and paging through a seed catalog. She was planning a flower garden that would be magically watered by moisture that came out of the sky.

  “You were married,” Morpheus remarked abruptly. He was examining the intricate geometry of crystals in the buds. “I met you once. With your husband.”

  “Could you tell he was an idiot?” I laughed, then stopped when I heard how bitter I sounded, how experienced, and therefore no longer young.

  “I didn’t notice very much about him. He was just a guy.” He shrugged. “But you were a closed box. I said that to Alizarin. I said, ‘I’ve never seen anyone who was such a closed box.’”

  I was glad he didn’t ask me why I’d married such a nondescript entity. I was grateful that he was discreet enough not to ask me if I yearned for children. I’m always tempted to tell people I have an obscure gynecological condition when they ask me that, but I worry about the details. It’s a rare treat to find someone whose sensibilities are delicate enough not to inquire.

  “So why did you marry him?” Morpheus asked now. “He seemed so nondescript. Were you yearning for children or something?”

  “I have never wanted children,” I began patiently. I always feel like I’m trying to explain some impenetrable cultural difference when I tell people that. But the fact is, there has never been a culture where women are allowed to sit around not having children without a proper alibi. There is something about unused feminine machinery that piques people’s curiosity and causes them to form opinions.

  If you are a childless, able-bodied woman with no sense of urgency about the fact that your child-bearing years are dwindling away, you have a number of options. You can join a celibate religious order or go to a country where you don’t speak the language. You can say you were born with vaginal agenesis, and explain that while you have the external genital equipment and normal ovaries, you have no vaginal canal, cervix, or uterus. You could throw in a few details about menstruation and kidney function to give the impression that you have either received comprehensive reading material from your doctors, or you spend a lot of time researching medical conditions you don’t have.

  Of course, you could always just tell people you don’t want to talk about it. This guarantees that they will then look extremely supercilious and say, “oh! Now I know why”; as if a woman who doesn’t care to discuss intimate decisions with a stranger must be cold to the point of frigidity.

  “He just knew I’d change my mind,” I told Morpheus. “And then when I didn’t, it was like somebody promised him a sea monkey and it turned out to be a brine shrimp. Only I never said I was a sea monkey. I said I was a small aquatic crustacean, and he was like, oh, so I get a monkey, right? From the ocean. What an idiot.” I felt like an unsympathetic character in a sitcom.

  Morpheus didn’t appear to notice. “So why did you marry him?” It was a simple question, and he asked it like a sacred fool.

  “Sheer stupidity.” I flung a few branches onto the wire, and they shivered, all the way down the line. The John was just so undeniably male, after all those years of mystic yonis, sacred whores, and endless female emotional process. He had a quick dismissiveness that made things seem so clear and easy; a way of laughing things off that looked like intelligent skepticism, if you weren’t inclined to look too hard.

  I thought he was honest, a plainspoken guy who called it like he saw it. When the first wave of dot-commers swarmed my city with their money and their startups, he lived out of his car and built intentional communities where people lived collectively and grew organic gardens. The fact that he built homes and lived out of his car should have served as an important nonverbal communication from a guy who never stopped calling it like he saw it—even when I asked him nicely if he would please just shut the fuck up and let me hear myself think.

  “Which tells you who the real idiot is,” I acknowledged. “See, I’m supposed to be intelligent and educated, and he’s a fucking troglodyte. Do you know what he told me? Stone cold sober: he said he thought my mom was a MILF.”

  Morpheus was mystified. “A mill?” His hearing really was deplorable.

  “A MILF. Mom I’d Like to Fuck. I am one hundred per cent positive I did not ever say, hey, my partner and my helpmeet: how’d you like to stuff your dick into my mom?”

  Morpheus gave the branch he was holding a light swing, like he was contemplating taking up golf. “I find humor that relies on acronyms tends to be un-witty,” he reproved at last.

  “I don’t think he was trying to be funny,” I told him. I was enveloped in unexpected anger and disgust. “I think it was just a piece of information he thought I might find interesting. I mean, what did he expect me to say? Thank you so much for sharing? Let’s have more open discussions about our wildly offensive sex
ual fantasies?” Morpheus smiled discreetly. “So what was the genesis of your marital bliss?” I inquired. My hostility was already fading into self-consciousness.

  “I was just . . . so impressed with Alizarin,” he said simply. It was the kind of thing people say to someone they will never meet again. “She’s just so emotionally healthy and fair-minded. And she’s so responsible. When we first moved up here together, we weren’t married.” He glanced at me, to see if I needed a few moments to adapt to the idea of premarital cohabitation. “And one day she pointed her finger at me and said, I’m going to marry you. As soon as I pay off my debts. And I thought, wow. Here is a woman who takes responsibility.” He sighed and shifted a little. The golf club pot branch was still hanging from his hand. “Plus I thought, I’m starting to get a little old and soft. Maybe it’s time to settle down. Get married.”

  “And here you are,” I said cheerfully. I have never liked enclosed spaces. The one I was standing in right now, with its reek of rotting rodents and fresh narcotics, was losing its charm in a hurry.

  He nodded. “Here I am.” He was looking at the pot branch like he could not even hope to fathom how to hang it on a line. “What exactly did you do when you left him? I mean, how did you go about doing it?”

  “I put all my shit on the sidewalk and left the country,” I declared.

  It wasn’t true. That was the impulsive, swashbuckling version, the one starring me as the great renouncer who gave it all up and never looked back. Morpheus waited patiently for the boring version.

  I sighed. “I called a random guy off craigslist. Richard. That was his name.” Richard was a paint huffer, and he initialed each clause of the rental contract with a giant novelty pen in the shape of a baby doll’s arm.

  “He had a rental agreement with about a hundred addendums or codas or whatever. He said he was a lawyer, but he never went to work. I think he got a law degree but never passed the bar or fucked up a case because he was high or something. So he just subleased rooms in his place in Lake Merritt. He had about nine people stuffed into a three-bedroom flat.” There was gunfire at night, but there was also a balcony, so it was possible to stand above the sidewalk with a glass of cold white wine, listening to gunshots and imagining oneself as a glamorous foreign correspondent.

  “That flat was nine point seven miles away from the shittiest job anyone has ever held in the civilian sector of a modern industrialized nation,” I went on.

  I covered that distance on a pink 1982 Bertoni racing bike. My mother gave it to me after I got hit by a car while riding an off-brand mountain bike, which was exactly the same shade of green as a John Deere. “You’ve gone from the tractor to the Clit Rocket,” she remarked, after noting that I was sure to have a few scars. The Clit Rocket was light and fast. My thighs began to look like something out of a drawing by R. Crumb.

  “I painted boats all summer long for twelve bucks an hour,” I continued, feeling less like a swashbuckling adventurer with every word I spoke.

  “Did you really put your stuff on the sidewalk, or is it boxed up neatly in your mother’s garage?” I had the feeling I could tell this guy I had a trust fund or a love of forest fires, and he wouldn’t hold either one against me.

  “No! I did.” After all, the great renunciate version was not untrue, in the strictest sense of the word. It was just abbreviated. “And then I left the country as an exchange student. All you had to do to get into the program was show up looking like a Young Republican and not break down crying during the interview.”

  To my knowledge, I have never laid eyes on a Young Republican. And if it hadn’t been for an uncannily prolonged endorphin high that bordered on mania, I never would have stopped crying. That, too, is an abbreviated version.

  “So that’s the story,” I told Morpheus. I’d finished hanging all the Chocolate Thai in my box, and now I eased his carton away from him and began to hang that, too. He handed me his branch, like I was his pot-hanging caddy.

  “Did it take you a long time to do it? Once you decided?” He was watching me hang pot the way a scholarly tourist might observe a native as she performed a picturesque ceremony. I could have been a Balinese worshiper, stringing garlands on my gods.

  “Not at all.”

  This, at least, was mostly true. I thought of how I felt washed in cool water when I left him. At Lake Merritt, I tucked myself into a room that was barely big enough to contain a washer and a dryer. There was in fact a 240 plug in the wall. Boxy outlines from the missing appliances were pressed into the floor. A single long black hair was curled into the folds of the mattress I put away each morning.

  “The space I lived in was so tiny, all my movements felt ritualized,” I said. It’s the kind of thing you only say out loud if you are trying to impress someone with how quirky and insightful you are.

  “I’ve felt that way at certain times in my life,” he agreed, as if he were recognizing me. “Like, oh, now I’m doing the breakfast asana.” And he began to flip a pair of unseen eggs, as slowly and deliberately as a Tai Chi master.

  “Exactly!” It was such an unforeseen pleasure, to be recognized by someone who could conjure an unseen breakfast using ancient esoteric arts. “And everything felt symbolic. We’d gotten a matching pair of beautiful ceramic mugs, and the first day I was at Crazy Richard’s, I dropped mine and the handle broke off. I felt like it signified how the useful part of my life was still intact, but I couldn’t be grabbed and held onto anymore.”

  He was nodding and laughing, like I’d shown unexpected improvisational skill. Then he took a branch and hung it cautiously. Hemp is barely weaker than a hank of human hair, but he handled it as if he thought it were as dainty as a spun-glass rose.

  “Have you seen Alizarin’s ring?” he asked suddenly, surveying his work as critically as a master glass blower. Her ring. Alizarin had extraordinarily long thumbs, but I could not recall anything about a ring. “Her wedding ring.”

  “Did she lose it?” I prompted.

  “It’s silver,” he finally revealed. His voice sounded ragged, like a kid who’s just realized that his mother is a playground laughingstock.

  “They’re usually gold, aren’t they?” I ventured. I had buried my wedding ring in the soil of a potted spider plant. The plant had been given to me by a woman much more beautiful than I am, the kind of woman who gives thoughtful little presents to the wives of men who are enchanted by her. I allowed that plant to die a slow and horrible death.

  Morpheus nodded. “She has a gold wedding ring. But she says she’s wearing the silver one because she doesn’t think my commitment to the marriage is worthy of a gold ring.”

  I hung the last of the Chocolate Thai on the line and wrote END CT on the back of a paper bag. I folded this over the wire and fastened it on with a clothespin. Very slowly, I drew an arrow underneath the letters, pointing to the last branch of Chocolate Thai. There were no more paper bags, so I tore a sheet of paper from my notebook and wrote DIESEL, with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction.

  “What is your level of commitment to the marriage?” I asked carefully. Not here to take a whore’s revenge, were the words that flashed through my mind.

  “I’m committed.” He stood as straight and proud as a man who is ready to die well.

  “Are you happy?” I persisted.

  “I don’t know if happiness . . .” he began. He sounded like his inclination was to deliver a dissertation on the perils of hedonism. Then he rallied, remembering the credo of his generation and his duty to uphold it. “I’ve been having what I think of as a matched set of dreams.”

  “Do you think they have anything to do with your situation?” I asked. I began to hang the toxic-smelling Diesel briskly on the line, like an efficient housekeeper organizing the fruits of a long season’s purposeful labor.

  “In the first one,” he said, and stopped. “I haven’t had this one since I left the City. Seven years ago.” I noticed that he referred to San Francisco the same way Caitlin does, with
an emphasis on “the city” that can only indicate a proper noun. “And now I’m having it again. It goes like this: my house is on fire. I’m living in a tall skinny house with lots of crooked fire escapes, like a drawing by Roald Dahl. The flames are coming out everywhere and I’m desperately trying to drag this Old World-looking trunk with ornate silver handles down the fire escape.”

  “Do you make it?” I asked. Diesel fumes were raging all throughout the underside of the house, like something subterranean released into the air.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never made it by the time I wake up. You seem to be familiar with symbols,” he added, like he’d found a Josephean dream reader in the garden with the pot.

  “What about the other one?” I asked. Maybe I did have untapped talents. Maybe I was wise.

  “This one I haven’t had since I was a teenager.” He was almost eager now. “I’m carrying my own dead body,” he reported with relish. “I’m looking all over for a place to bury it, but it’s like that old Batman episode, where he’s looking for a place to throw away the bomb. You remember that one? He runs over to throw it in the water, but there’s a mama duck with her ducklings, so he rushes over to this secluded woodsy spot, but there’s this couple having a picnic, and then there’s a woman with a baby carriage and over here there’s a gaggle of schoolkids and nobody notices the guy in the Halloween costume charging around with a ticking bomb. It’s like he’s having a nightmare.”