A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  I shook my head. It may have been the first time since she’d interviewed me for the job that she’d asked me a direct question.

  “Well . . . have you ever heard of Glastonbury?”

  I recovered my power of speech enough to tell her no, I had not ever been to England. I did not know about this region, the last syllable of which she pronounced like it was a soft French cheese.

  “Well, Glastonbury is a bit like . . . Santa Fe,” she explained, savoring the comparison. “Only it’s medieval, of course. It’s one of the major energy centers of our world. There’s this great old cathedral in Wells, just a few miles off, and there’s this ruined abbey . . . King Arthur is supposed to be buried there,” she added eagerly, as if the presence of Pendragon’s bones were an all-purpose authenticator. “And of course it draws all kinds of spiritual leaders and people who are sensitive to that kind of thing.” She gave me a searching look. “I ended up there,” she went on, after a pause wherein much was implied. “It’s a long story. I was young, and well, I was really fucked up, to be honest with you. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, and I was just depressed and mean to people all the time. Because I was depressed, of course. You understand. I didn’t eat right. I don’t really need to go into it.

  “My parents were terribly unloving,” she continued, by way of elaborating on a subject that didn’t bear going into. “They fought all the time. They didn’t know how to communicate lovingly. My mother, especially . . . she was so hard on my poor dad. They were ignorant, really, and I think they resented us for disrupting this beautiful love affair they had before we came along.” She scanned my face again, a little sternly this time. “It’s an awful thing to say about your own mum and dad, but I’m quite sure it’s true. My father died without ever once saying he loved us.” She was going red around the eyes and her nose had gotten moist in a way that was not pretty to look at.

  “So I wound up in Glastonbury.” She recovered herself and became almost lively, the way people do when they summon the strength to haul themselves through the same old origin story they’ve told a thousand times. “I think I felt the energy, and I wanted some help, but I was too mixed up to understand how much I needed it. So one night, I didn’t have anything to do and I thought, well, why not walk around a little. Smoke some cigarettes, eat some crappy food. I was so awful to people all the time, I didn’t really have any friends. So I went into this place.”

  I could see that the place was vivid in her memory, down to the dusty tables and the crumbling medieval stones. But she was a storyteller who relied on tone and implication; on emphases, omissions, and prolonged eye contact to convey the significance of things. So the pivotal location remained a simple noun. It could have been an open field, a live volcano, or a corridor in a house of correction.

  “I thought it was a club,” she explained, “because there was all this noise, like there was a party or maybe a fight going on. But it was an American man, speaking to this crowd of, well, freaks, I guess you could call them. He was creating quite a stir, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  I decided that I would not under any circumstances imagine this stir, like a child who’s been forced to go to a party and refuses to have a good time.

  “He was there to clear the place out.” She was in something like an excitable trance, telling tales of heroes from the days before the world as we know it began. “The whole place, all of Glastonbury.”

  I began to get the sense of something dreadful and historical taking place before me, there in the past where nothing can be changed. People always talk about suspense as if it were a type of deadly serious coyness about the ending, like no one really knows what’s coming for them; but I think suspense is a quality of dread for what you know damned good and well is coming up.

  I knew who this man was by now. He was the con man out of every legend, pettiness transcended by sheer force of personality. He was elevated to a tawdry godhood by the number of times his smirking image was reflected in his followers’ eyes. He could have been any charismatic outcast, leading misfits to their doom. He could have been Erik the Red, rounding Cape Farewell, exploring Greenland in the loneliness of exile.

  By now, Fiona was transfixed by the memory of what he’d faced. “Of course, when you have a place like that, with so much energy swirling around, you’re going to attract the forces of darkness, too.”

  Remember that Erik the Red was banished from Iceland for the crime of double homicide.

  “And he was there to clear out all the negative energy,” she went on. “To let the seven rays shine through directly. Like light through a window.”

  And Greenland, the cold enticing fraud, is covered in glittering snow.

  Fiona was explicating the nature of her leader’s adversity now. “Anyway, he was extremely unpopular, because the forces of darkness had got quite a hold on the place.” She seemed unaware of the fact that she was quoting a synopsis for every fantasy thriller ever written; every script for every bad idea that calls for a following, ready to die or give up and pay and pay and pay.

  Erik’s father Thorvald was a killer, too. People wander for a reason.

  “And me, too,” Fiona said quietly. “I was just so angry, all the time. I heard him speaking, and I thought, this guy is a kook. You know? And that’s what people were saying. You know how people are. They’ll say anything to deny the truth.”

  Like calling it Greenland, to entice the livelihoods of people who don’t even know enough to ask for photographic evidence.

  “He hadn’t manifested as the Buddha Maitreya yet, and he was just going by his regular American name,” she confided, as if having a name were evidence of humble roots, and therefore authenticity. “I mean, let’s be real. He has a name, right?”

  Erik or Eirik, Thorvaldsson or Raude, Erik the Red, expert navigator, leader of five hundred settlers around the Cape and up the coast. What else do you do, when you’re in so many feuds, on a tiny island nation?

  “Everyone just called him Ron then, Ron Spence,” she revealed, in the let’s-just-be-reasonable tone that some Christians use when they admit that, yes, if Jesus was a man, he must have taken a dump at some point. “They were saying, it’s just a cult, whatever. But I’ve met him.” She broke into her own story excitedly, as if it were too much for her to repeat aspersions without contradicting them. “I’ve met the mother of his children. So I know him.” This was her proof, then: his ability to sucker a woman into raising his kids.

  Erik the Red, son of a killer.

  “I know now that he really is for real. But that night—” She shook her head. Something in me leapt in wild irrational hope. I felt the way I did when I read Maria Stuart and thought for a moment that the Catholic queen might just escape; that Elizabeth might spare her noble cousin. Stupid, I thought. You know how this story ends.

  The settlers who remained in Greenland vanished without leaving a trace.

  “I listened to the forces of darkness that had their hold on me,” she admitted softly. “I left before he even finished speaking.” She twisted her napkin. “It wasn’t until months later, when I went to Wells and heard him speak again, that something just clicked. I think it was a realignment of energy. I thought, whoa, this makes really good sense. It was like he was speaking directly to me, you know? So I said, all right. I’ll give this a try. It’s not like I could possibly be any more miserable. Isobel,” she said to me, more gently than anyone has ever said my name. “I was in a really bad way. I don’t even want to go into it right now. But he saved my life. He really did.” She gazed off across the valley and into the hills, where not one undistinguished ruin broke up the monotony of deep-rooted oaks and withered blonde grass.

  “I went to one of the centers for a week.” She sounded relieved, like a reprobate who’s finally gotten to the part of the story where she turns her life around. This wasn’t a confession. This was a tale of redemption. “They gave us good food. I felt so much better. I got deeply involved. I always just dive in, w
hen I get into something. It’s all or nothing, for me.” It sounded very much bragging, like she would defy any weak-willed person to accuse her of doing things halfway. “Ron—His Holiness, he saw how committed I was, and he came to me one day, and said, I’d like you to manage a house for me. In Tibet.” She paused. Something in her went palpably quiet, as she seemed to experience, once again, the importance of that honor. “I went to Tibet,” she said slowly, enunciating each word, the way people do when they do not expect you to believe them. I thought she might be daring me to contradict her, as if going to Tibet were a matter of opinion or interpretation. I began to wonder how I’d tell the story about staying on the mountain, in the weeks that Alizarin and Morpheus were gone.

  “I lived in a house with seventeen people,” she remembered. Something about the number seventeen (its precision? Its oddness? Its primeness?) made me sure that she had, indeed, lived in a house with seventeen people. “So I know how to live in groups. It was up to me to manage these projects His Holiness was running. I got really good at scheduling and working really hard and making sure everyone was up on time. We worked really hard,” she repeated, with stubborn non-unionized pride. “We were fixing up houses for monks and nuns in Tibet and selling them so they could buy food and clothes. In Tibet, the nuns aren’t recognized, you know. They have to support themselves, and it’s really hard for them to get anything done. Ron said, this isn’t right. We’ve got to do something about this. But after a while, I had to quit.”

  I thought she had rushed to the ending. Maybe I was witnessing a previously unexamined episode of disillusionment. This woman who was capable of acknowledging that she’d been fucked up and angry would eventually see that she’d also been tricked. Hadn’t she just referred to His Holiness as Ron, without correcting herself?

  “Why did you quit?” I asked in a low voice. I haven’t done a good job of conveying this, but I cared about Fiona. I cared about her the way my heart might break for a smelly old three-legged dog I had no intention of saving.

  She turned her pulsing eyes on me. “I got to the point where I was relying on my will all the time. I was pushing, pushing, pushing, and only developing my will.”

  I was deeply impressed, and a little afraid.

  “Also.” She paused as a lone crow winged across the cloudless sky. “I injured my back. I didn’t pick up some enormous thing or have a building fall on me or anything. It was just the constant stress and not enough sleep and moving around from place to place all the time.” She sounded exactly like someone who is capable of analyzing facts. “Sometimes, we’d set off across the mountains with a truck full of materials and it would take us all night. We didn’t know the terrain, and a lot of times, the guides weren’t much better. There aren’t a lot of accurate maps in Tibet.” She sniffed, like an old-fashioned British explorer who lives to be disdainful of inept native cartography. “We’d get there just a few hours before dawn, and we still had to set up and be ready because we had a crew coming. The nuns were waiting for us.”

  I was waiting, too. I, who never questioned her once, was waiting for her to slap her napkin on the table and declare that finally, she came to her senses and left him. Instead, like a woman yearning for a lover she spurned in her hot-headed youth, she said, “I’d like to go back. But the openings don’t come up that often, and with my injury, there’s not a lot I could do. It’s nothing personal. I’m just not that useful anymore. He lets me make healing tools. There’s not a lot of people who are allowed to make tools. But with the trust he has in me . . . Sometimes, I heal myself with the tools. It’s working, I think, but the Lord doesn’t always do what we tell him to do.”

  Mariana began to scream wildly. “Verdelein!” she screamed, like her one remaining child was trapped in the rubble of a burning building. “Verdelein! Verdelein! Verdelein!” She sounded as if she would scream this way for the rest of her life. Fiona smiled.

  “I’ll take care of that,” she said, with the quiet authority of a nun who has wandered the mountains of Tibet, in service of her sister nuns.

  MY MOTHER HAD gone semi-digital. There is no virtue in this, so her work was very good. She offered a detailed explanation of how she did it, with mirrors or lenses or maybe sex magic, but I wasn’t paying attention.

  That well-traveled envelope contained, not photos, plural, but one single printout from her digital camera. It was a dual image of her one and only child (as far as I know, she’d always add, with a graceful writhe and a smirk. My mother was an unexpected hit with the PTA and the Ladies’ Auxiliary). I remembered her taking that picture, shortly after I’d left The John. I was wearing black, which, even in the rosiest bloom of my tow-headed youth, has always made me look worn out with sorrow or intestinal parasites.

  I was standing in front of a heart’s-blood velvet curtain in my mother’s stage-set chambers, leaning my head against a wardrobe that was alleged to be part of my grandmother’s trousseau. “That’s a family heirloom,” my mother told me. “Granny Franny bought it new with her very first paycheck.” It occurred to me that the teenaged Francine Swift could stretch a paycheck like no one before her or since.

  “What about the gun cabinet, Mom?” I asked. I was in a pretty good mood. My e-ticket to Frankfurt was waiting for me at San Francisco International Airport, Gate Number Nine. Every time I thought about it, I started humming, Love Potion Number Nine, and snapping my fingers softly. I was drinking heavily. I was also smoking so much, every breath felt like a revelation. “I thought she bought the gun cabinet with her very first paycheck,” I teased my mother lovingly. “And a pair of real leather pink go-go boots, like Nancy Sinatra.”

  “Just try to look pensive, honey,” my mother directed. “This is our new beginnings shot. One door opens, another door closes.”

  “It’s the other way around,” I told her, feeling unaccountably mild. “One door closes, another door opens. I can’t believe we’re arguing about clichés,” I added, as if I’d never even heard of a mother and daughter who didn’t dote on one another.

  “They’re cultural axioms,” she responded, bringing some academic standing to the argument. Somewhere during this exchange of penetrating insights, my mother took the picture she would send me years later, in the valley of the mountains at Mariana’s Hof. New Beginnings, she’d written on the back, with the simplicity and affection that filled her letters.

  I said it was a dual shot. I’m sure it was a simple procedure, involving one or two clicks of the mouse on my mother’s antique desktop. But you would have thought she was Lady Lovelace (Ada, not Linda), by the way she crowed about how she’d doubled my image. Francine’s wardrobe had vanished as thoroughly as that first paycheck, so many years ago. Instead, one picture of me pressed its left temple against the right temple of its mirror image. I looked like a set of identical twins, caught in a moment with the exact same expression on two versions of one face.

  There was one minor discrepancy. Neither of these women looked anything like me. They were alert and melancholy. The two identical versions of their mouth slanted away from one another, like a cutting word, gone unsaid. Because of my black clothing and the deep internal red of my mother’s curtains, my faces looked like plaster casts, my necklines smooth as bowling pins. My eyes were so dark they had no pupils, just a few highlights glimmering weakly, like the sun on a day with an air quality advisory.

  If I hadn’t just spent a whole semester posing nude, I would say there could not possibly be a less flattering picture of me in existence. Every asymmetry of my features was repeated, from my uneven eyebrows to the crumpled arches of my badly broken nose. My battered skin was stretched and tender from the wind and the sun.

  By now, I was scrutinizing the double image with the same dispassionate care I’d had for Enid, my old garden friend from Alizarin’s studio. I saw how the shadow on the bulb of the nose made a fanciful flourish as it deepened into the nostrils; how softly that thick purple ribbon of shade caressed the crooked lines of my injury. And t
hen, slowly, seeping from the shadows, a sense of something cradling this damaged face emerged. The outside lines of cheek and chin were echoed in the living thumb that held the photograph. My thumb. The tendons of the neck agreed with the wrist—my wrist, where I saw the pulse behind the bones. There was an awkward softness here. I saw it, flickering among the pixelated freckles of an ugly woman’s photograph.

  I began to draw.

  “MAY I SEE what you are working on?” There was something terrifying about how indestructible the old lady was. It would be a lot more reassuring if we were all just a little more fragile.

  I showed her my drawing. I had delved into pixels and patches and spots of poor resolution and discovered there were glorious streaks of purple in the shadows of the nose and mouth. I’d found a mixture of warm orangey greens and cool brown pinks in the unshaded plains of the forehead and cheeks. Something about the unreality of all this color made me feel like I was really made of flesh. I could feel the grit of the pigments in the creases of my hands. If someone had taken my fingerprints just then, I would have been identified in hazy smudges of ambiguous color. As I worked, I could hear Mariana’s labored breathing through the open door of the sewing room. I could feel my own heartbeat, as I blended and smeared and re-adjusted millimeters of first one nose, then the other; as I mapped the terrain of a country that was no longer a face, let alone a possession of mine.

  I showed the dying woman my drawing. Wasn’t that a dying request? Everything now, from extra ice cubes in her glass to midnight phone calls, could very easily be a last wish.

  “Who is he?” she demanded. I could tell she was alert by how rushed and peremptory she was, like she knew the interval would be brief and wanted to get as much out of it as possible.