A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  It was neither of those things. He was fascinated by the shapes of the energy around him, he said. He was caressing unseen juggler’s balls that formed in the curves of his palms; that played beguiling tricks with space and rounded the parabola of time in patterns that sharpened and shone.

  He was only about two and a half decades younger than my grandmother, and he was an old man now. His hair was white and clean. He held himself erect, because of the terrible pain of growing old. “It’s so bad,” he said gravely, “that it’s terrible.” He could have been a high-ranking analyst, delivering the results of an important study to the chairman of the board. “You know where that’s from, right?” Like many people in my family, he was unwilling to drop an unexplained cultural reference into a conversation. “It’s Andy Kaufman, Foreign Man,” he revealed. Then he made a brief appearance as Foreign Man. “Take my wife!” he cried in an unidentifiable accent. He began to flap his hands hysterically. “Her cooking eez is so bad!” he shrieked. “That eet’s terrible! Thank you! Thank you!” He concluded with a body-shaking show of laughter, as if he were doing a wholehearted but not entirely accurate impression of an earthling in the throes of delight.

  Then, because humans look at memorabilia in addition to conducting laughter-making rituals, Lisette Saulé unearthed a photo of her son as a smiling young man, the summer before I was born. He had a sharp-collared shirt and curly brown hair. His head was tilted toward the sky, his throat exposed like a sacrifice.

  She brought out a drawing. “He did this under the influence of LSD,” she remarked, as soberly as an art historian, delivering a discourse on the Green Muse. “He said that LSD made him very creative.” She smiled politely at the drawing. Remember, she was born at a time when natural philosophers were drawing plants in pen and ink, labeling them in Latin. “He may have overestimated its effectiveness.”

  “Oh, I was on acid and speed when I drew that,” our visitor clarified. He gave a light nostalgic chuckle as he rummaged around for a different pair of eyeglasses. He was holding the drawing like a man who is fascinated by the shapes of the energy in his hands; but also like someone whose eyes are going bad, so he has to look at things askance.

  “Look! It’s a little birdie. Eating spaghetti.” His face was a mass of gentle laugh lines as he pointed at the tangle of pen strokes. “The quality of the line seemed a lot more solid when I did it,” he conceded, as if he had been raised by a woman who spoke like a museum docent when examining any work of art. I thought of how young he used to be, how stoned, living in corners on the edge of the world with his visions of birdies, pulling up worms. He was the sweetest, most innocent felon I ever did know.

  By this time, my grandmother was tired, so we walked outside in broad daylight. Cars roared past us. People made deliveries. A meter maid wrote parking tickets. Dozens and possibly hundreds of people saw us. We could have been any old man and much younger woman, meeting one more time after so many years.

  I left him in the parking lot of a drugstore while I went inside to print some pictures of myself and some of the things I had done in the last twenty years. I imagined the pictures existing in a place I’d never been, mystifying the officials who would go through his belongings after he died, alone and unclaimed. They would begin to get an inkling that he wasn’t who he’d always said he was, when he appeared on their shores so many years ago. I wanted him to be proud of me, too. I wanted our final reunion to be an experience that soared with emotional authenticity and a kind of formality, with paperwork and declarations and maybe a few epiphanies.

  When I came out, he was watching a giant green balloon in the shape of a popular cartoon character. The balloon was gyrating wildly, desperate to draw attention to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy a used car. It straddled a fan the size of a Volkswagen, which filled it ’til the great balloon flung its arms into the air, aiming eyes the size of hubcaps at the blue impassive sky.

  “I’ve always wished I could do that,” he admired. “Just flail around bonelessly.”

  The balloon was terrifying a small dog and making babies cry.

  I handed him the photographs. There I was, smiling and wearing lipstick, standing next to a painting at my show in a small gallery. I grinned on a beach with a nice young man. I picnicked in the Odenwald with people I knew in the miscellaneous way that people are friends when no one is staying for long.

  He kept murmuring wordlessly. Ah, he murmured. Ah. “It’s so much more than I expected,” he said at last. He pressed the photographs against his chest in a disorganized way, as if he couldn’t figure out how to hold them.

  “Here. You can put them in this.” I made an unnecessarily efficient production out of tidying them into the folder the drugstore had provided. He watched like I was showing him how to do a magic trick.

  He was always like that: struck dumb with wonder by the simplest things, spurred into action by others that shatter more practical souls. While he was transfixed by a giant green advertising balloon, an entire graduating class of business majors moved into the workforce with a sense of purpose. While they were holding conference calls on the importance of thinking outside the box, he was dodging dangers none of them had ever heard of. He was on a wire, poised to leap into his destiny as they pondered the nuances of casual Friday. He was exactly who he always was and who he always would be. There would be no final bow, no encore, no cheerful farewell strains of music played by clowns as families trailed out of the tent and into the sunshine. He would be a wire-walker, all the days of his life, and his eyesight would dim as he watched the horizon move further and further away.

  HE TOLD ME about his search for an identity. People of his generation were always looking for themselves. He gave me names and dates and details that would make a true crime writer go into paroxysms of ecstasy. They washed over me like figures in a NASDAQ report.

  I do recall that he went to a graveyard where an infant boy was buried, in the days when my grandmother’s children were young. He found the boy’s gravestone and determined that the child had died on the day that he, like a reincarnation of himself, was born. “He was Catholic,” he said, “so I looked up all nine relevant diocese in the area. And then I called them, and the Monseigneur or whatever gave me all the information I needed. Catholics love records,” he added, like a man remarking on a very good meal.

  Because he had become a kind of grave robber, collecting the names of the dead, he also found a boy with spina bifida and club feet. This child had drowned in the days before people were born with Social Security numbers, which is key for a fugitive of a certain age, trying to acquire a set of identity documents. It’s better if you can get the proper agencies to give you real papers for someone who’s been dead a long time, since forgeries are fairly easy to spot. Plus, there is that inviolable law about creating something from nothing.

  “Congenital talipes equivarus,” he enunciated. He was fully prepared for a quiz on the conditions he was supposed to have. If anyone ever asked, he explained, “I could always say I had spina bifida occulta, and that it was asymptomatic. And if they noticed that I have normal feet, I could say, oh, I had night strapping. And a heel tendon pull.” They sounded like the kinds of things that could only be done at a crossroads on a full moon.

  He told me about Wesley, who turned him in; Wesley with seashells braided into his hair, beautiful and amoral as the spirit of betrayal itself. “I thought he was really my friend,” he remembered, like he was outlining the plot of a story that had moved him deeply in his youth. “I had a very warm feeling for Wesley.” He shook his head. “That was such a crazy scene. Cah-ray-zee.” He laughed, and his old teeth flashed, showing straight and strong and just a little yellowed. It was the earthling laugh again. “I miss it so much.”

  And then, I think because he knew we’d never meet again, he told me the story of my birth. He said the attending nurse cut my mother. “What’s that called,” he said, cutting the air with his small showman’s hand. Episiotomy, said I, not
knowing how or why that word should be my own. “When the doctor came back, he told me it was a completely unnecessary procedure,” he said, like the time had come to tell great secrets. “I never told your mom,” he finished, watching me steadily with pale blue eyes.

  When he was gone, I noticed that I was influenced by him. Sometimes, I hear his inflections in my words. I feel the balance of his spine in the way I walk. I see myself acting out stories like a latter-day vaudevillian, like him. And why not, after all? The love is so plain, the crime so insignificant.

  Sarah Reith was born into a circus family in San Francisco, and ran away to join the army as soon as she turned eighteen. She was a parachute rigger at the jump school on Fort Benning, Georgia, where one of her incidental duties was “wind dummy,” or jumping out of an airplane ahead of a class of airborne students so the instructors could check the wind conditions. After concluding that life as a dummy lacked intellectual stimulation, she used her GI Bill to earn a BA in creative writing at Mills College for women. She worked as a bike messenger and a barista for some years before going back to school in Germany. She studied for her MA in German literature in the shadow of a medieval castle, burying her nose in little yellow volumes with very dense print and lots of umlauts. She is currently a reporter in Mendocino County, working on her second novel.