2010

The black SUV pulls into my driveway on the evening of my twenty-ninth day sober. Juni is downstairs, bouncing in the safari seat in front of her cartoons. Twilight has fallen, but I have been trying and failing to work all day, and I have yet to pause to turn on the lamp. Soon, my toddler will cry for her dinner. Everything is dim. Then, from deep within my labors, I perceive the scattering of gravel beneath car wheels, the noise of an engine shifting momentarily into idle, the brake-light red from below. I hear it, and in an instant, it’s like I’m high.

Are you ready, SpongeBob?

My nerves spark, little signals pinging from knee to knuckle, from thigh to throat. Someone’s here. Someone’s come. I stand, move toward the window with the soundlessness of a midnight mother, staying within the shadowed interior until I can peer into the scant view of the driveway. California plates, white sticker on the rear bumper, rolled down window. Mud-spattered, it is a car that has been lived in, but the driver is only a nose and a forehead. From the cracked window, a wisp of cigarette smoke climbs, a whiff of campfire and molasses. Something sings in me. It’s you, I think, and who are you?

I try, but I cannot make the link. Then, the driver’s moment of indecision ends. The engine below revs, shifts into gear.

I’m in the hallway, on the landing, taking the stairs. The lights from Juni’s bouncy seat scatter a pattern against the walls. Go, SpongeBob, go! Go, SpongeBob, go!

I reach the front door just as the car pulls out. The hand in the window flicks the cigarette (a gesture just a bit too girlish to be cool; a gesture I know I know) through the closing automatic window. I run.

“Don’t you dare,” I yell. I thump on the passenger door.

In the tinted window, my own mad face and shoeless feet regard me, the gaping door of my suburban home behind. The driver might be no one, a stranger making a U-turn or one of the bit player scumbags who accrue at the edges of lives like mine, but it doesn’t feel like happenstance. Every flash and movement feels freighted with significance. You are here. You have come for me. You’re back.

I focus in on the brightly reflective glass, the intangibly faint silhouette within. Man? Woman? A lighter flares inside just as the street lamps illuminate. The world shifts into a yellower palette, washes of detail. There is a hesitation, a hanging pause, as if the person inside has finally recognized me in return. Do something, I goad the shimmering glass. Say something.

The transmission shifts and then grinds as the driver throws the vehicle into reverse—I make out the image on the sticker I’d noticed upstairs: it is a pale green saguaro on a white oval field. The decal is familiar. Everything is familiar. The engine thrusts into drive, and wheels off into the night.

“Don’t leave me,” I call after it and then, for reasons I can’t discern, I say, “I’m sorry,” but the driver is gone. The taillights vanish and I am returned to the twilight of a few moments earlier. The suburban street is precisely the same as before—safe and bland, the sidewalks bathed in the glow of televisions. Only the still-smoldering cigarette butt in the gutter testifies to my visitor. I pick it up. It’s an off-brand, a half-inch from the filter, but I drag in the old familiar flavor, and my chest throbs with loss, and—and unnamable shame and everything becomes ash.

You see, SpongeBob? Everything works out in the end.

Everything is as before, except I’ve been burned alive. I should, I must go inside, close up my computer, give my daughter her dinner, proceed with the script of my nights. I should, I must stay sober. But I am not going to do that. Instead, I am going go to score a shitload of cloud and get as high as I know how.

Juni doesn’t fuss when I shut off the TV.

“Want to go for a drive with mama?” I say, bright as summer. Everything is OK. Everything is fine. It’s just that I’ve fallen into the sewer of my own need, and everything stinks and I can’t make it through another heartbeat in this filthy living room, this despicable life.

I hoist Juni from the bouncer and onto my hip. I put an applesauce and a tub of corn puffs into the diaper bag. She babbles brightly. She loves to go for a drive.

It might seem unthinkable, but you only have to cop once with a small child in tow before it becomes perfectly ordinary, before you find yourself handing over her car seat to your dealer’s eight- year-old daughter so you can eat what you need. It’s a junkie stutter in my love for her, the need for what I eat shorting the connection between my mother feeling and the care I owe her. First the drug, always, and then whatever is left over is for my daughter.

“Fern dorm,” she gurgles as I strap her into the car seat. “Mend tie.”
I am not singular in these routines. There is a small, elite sisterhood of users like me, buying our Gerber peas and testing formula on our wrists as we coast from high to high. For a while, occasionally for a long while, we can pull it off. Each day we make a thousand bad bargains, lie and say that we have insulated them. We say they do not notice the hungry wolf pacing the perimeter of our love. But my daughter knows my wolf. It is in the pitch of my voice, my shortened temper, in how suddenly everything must be done both quickly and perfectly. She knows, all right. I have not insulated her. She is late to talk and her language is strange, but I understand what her fist and her little cough are telling me: ‘it’s happening again,’ she means, or ‘don’t let this happen again,’ or ‘this is doing me yet more harm.’

Look. I spent ten years, twenty, vowing to get sober. I’d wake up, today’s the day. Sometimes I’d make it to noon. Sometimes I’d make it to breakfast. Each evening turned into a story about staying high enough not to hate myself for my own weakness. And then in the hospital, they showed me Juni’s little beating heart on the monitor and I turned over a new leaf. Except, no, I didn’t. Even a baby in my belly, even a baby three months old and crying did not get me clean. And then, two years later, in the senseless logic of addiction and recovery, my toddler got me sober where my baby did not. Twenty- nine days. It may not sound like much but it’s the biggest, baddest thing I’ve ever done, and every second of it hurts like hell.

Did I eat cloud when she was inside me? Yes. Was she born damaged because of it? Yes. Yes. She has a regular brain and all the usual limbs but there are characteristic oddities in the size and shape of her fingernails, in the splay of her toes. There is a typical tendency toward respiratory infection that may turn to nothing or may kill her. Developmentally, there’s real variation from child to child. Cloud use, in utero, is under-studied. For now, I can say that she’s fine.

Stoplight: I root around for a pen on the floor. In the rearview, out the driver’s window two SUVs slow and stop—one rides low to the ground as if weighted with an entire life. The only paper at hand is one of Juni’s construction paper scribbles. Even though she’s almost two, Juni still can’t hold the crayon right, so her babysitter positions the paper, and pushes Juni’s hand around so everyone can feel she’s having a normal childhood. On three separate squares, I write Prince Cigarettes then Saguaro and CA Plates, proof against my fading memory, and lodge the blue scraps between the already-crammed pages of a paperback which has long served as my informal filing system. A Post-it wafts into my lap.

Fucking call Emily G-ddamn it.

Cloud users forget, like blackout drunks. We forget, and when we remember again, the familiar and the strange have swapped; things have gone missing entirely. Which is why, even though I’ve been waiting for it for two years, even though that flick of the cigarette pummeled my heart and that smoke woke me like the lifting of a curtain, I have no idea if the driver was a hookup or a husband, a savior or an enemy. But the return has cracked me open and now I need to get high.

The light changes. One of the SUVs peels off. The other—the low-riding one—sticks with me, and I take a hard left. My most reliable dealer is Billy in Brighton. He has a big screen TV in his living room, a girlfriend and a daughter, but I said some things to him last time I was there about getting clean, and now it’s been weeks and so I’m going to the Village Fens instead. In my early memory, this was a hopeful little place where middle-income people might have lived well, but there were corrupt developers and zoning problems and building in a fenland is a bad idea from the start. These apartments became, by the time I was a teenager, the sort of place where people cooked cloud.

I pull into the parking lot, tires shuddering over the uneven paving, and no one follows. Juni coughs in the backseat.

“Good girl,” I say as I hand her the corn puffs. “Good girl.”
“Worm turn,” says Juni. “Gemmed sky.”
“Shh,” I say to Juni now; I peel the foil back on the apple sauce, hand her the spoon, and ease myself out of the car.
Now, I think about the taste of cloud, harsh and acidic, and I listen to Juni’s ragged breathing. She needs a real dinner, a real mother. The problem with children, with your own children, is that they aren’t actual witnesses to your degradation. Since you are life to them, they do not hold you to account. And other than Juni, I am alone, unless you count Emily. March in New England: everything is cold and brown, but you can smell the green shooting up through the layers of winter rot. You can already find the lunatic crocuses, the pale ones that come first and die soonest. In two weeks, there will be forsythia and tulips, then the last frost and the sudden green in the trees. I want to last until then. I do. I want to figure out how not to be the same shithead I’ve been for my whole life. I don’t want to be some damaged person who cries when a stranger pulls into her driveway, but even more than I want to be better, I want to be high.

Cloud, when it first hits, bitter in the front of the mouth, harsh in the throat, bathes you in a momentary forgetting. The effects, over a lifetime of use, are known only anecdotally. After I bottomed out in California, after the bus trip cross-country, vomiting off some dirt road beneath the towering pines, after the hospital stay, I discovered I had accidentally traded luggage with a stranger. Unpacking my duffel bag, in provisional room that was Juni’s and my first home, I realized I did not recall any of the faces in the framed photographs. The suitcase belonged to some other woman, a woman like me to be sure, who had packed hastily, who wore my size and who balled underpants into the outer pockets of her luggage, but she was not me. Or I was no longer she.

Even the pines, the towering pines, by the lake shore somewhere, they now feel like visitations from a foreign mind. When I try to recall the gap between that moment and the hotel room, I slip into a red panic. Perhaps I was never there. Perhaps, in some other timeline, it is the place on which the whole of my fate pivots.

Now, I leave the car running to keep Juni warm, the doors unlocked because that seems safer. My footsteps crack the ice frozen into the mud tracks as I cross the parking lot. It’s just a couple of steps from the car to the building. A few of the units are boarded up, abandoned. From one of the occupied buildings, I hear a father calling upstairs to a kid. The particulars are muffled, but I get the sense. Come down and clear your plate or Finish your homework or You need to get in the shower. I think of Emily, who at this time of night will be memorizing figures for her accountancy exam in the one bedroom of her Dorchester apartment, while her son Leo watches TV on his foldout in the parlor. Lemon-detergent steam, perhaps from a laundry unit, and perhaps from a cloud lab, pours from the basement of my dealer’s unit. Fucking call.

G-d, I used to be so proud of my modest restraint, the three nights a week I didn’t pass out. I thought I was so fucking exceptional. I thought I was barely an addict at all.

Fucking Call Emily, G-ddamit

Details. The work I did in California, the reason I have a house and a paid-off car, was to embed hitchhiker programs in videos. My part was to convince people to download them, to split a narrative at the critical moment, to create a tiny drama which encouraged a cautious viewer to click through, even though they knew better, to agree to put our software in their hard drive. My boss, Lew, made the videos—dirty pictures, fetish stuff, copycats of popular extant porn. I waited for a tease, the fingertip at the neckline, the zipper parting, and then I offered fulfillment—click yes to continue. I remember how easy the work was on cloud, how it felt to scan the frames with the singing sensation of high in my skull. I was the best, the best damn technician in the field, and worth every check Lew wrote me, but every junkie turns unreliable in the end. Every junkie begins to lose details.

—I’ve reached the concrete landing before one of the lit units. Something about the details is bothering me. They all look alike, half-timbered, the fanciful tower, the stucco breaking off in chunks. From within, I hear the music of a singing competition. It’s old-lady entertainment. The curtains are old- lady curtains, brown mushroom pattern faded from twenty years of sun. I cannot recall if it’s the right place. Is this the right place? The house where I used to buy? Or is this a different house, the one where I came as a teenager and—what?—I ate grilled cheese and wore a skirt made out of men’s ties and then the power went out. I fidget, shift, and then the lemon is in my mouth and I reach for the bell.

Cloud sucks away hesitation. High, details clarify. Sober, I get mired in the swamp of loneliness and need. For example, the job that had posted on the Seychelles server through which my boss routed his communications—I could not get it done. The project itself seemed to be only partial, contained a link to a truncated video clip, reference to a code I was supposed to drop in, an implied deadline. I owed Lew. When I bottomed out in California, it was Lew and his wife who had found me, had gotten me to the hospital. He’d given me this life. In return, for all that, I had made a promise when I had left. It wasn’t something vague, like staying sober, though he might have asked that of me, too. There was a thing he counted on me to do, a specific project, and so secret or risky that at some point I believe I must have hidden it even from myself. I had waited for him to make contact for nine months. And when finally he did, I could not do follow through. My sobriety was the problem. High, you don’t deliberate. The answer comes like a taste in your mouth. High, you don’t care who is driving the SUV idling by your house. You just climb in, before the chance has passed. The just not thinking, the not fucking worrying or trying anymore, the way you give yourself over to it, the way it absolves you of everything. I can taste that feeling too.

I lean on the bell again. Come on. Come on. Something stirs on the other side of the door and a shadow moves toward me.

You come to horse for release of pain, for the ease sighing in your joints. You come to weed for laughter. You come to coke for sharpness, to molly for pleasure, but you come to cloud to begin again. If cloud sometimes speaks to you from some other life, offers you recognitions which do not match your experience, then perhaps, in cloud, you can rewind to the moment just before it went bad; cloud promises you can start anew. Sober, I am stuck with myself, my own bad days. Sober, I cannot escape.

The dealer’s door opens. The small figure within is backlit. Behind me, in the parking lot, there is movement, but I am too focused on the door, to turn and check. The door answerer is an elderly lady, barelegged, dragging gray slippers. We look at each other, neither of us pleased. “Where’s my delivery?” she demands. I feel a sinking. An uncertainty. What if I’m doing it again? My dealer doesn’t live here; my dealer lives in Brighton with his daughter. This is a different Mellie’s dealer, a different timeline, a long ago cloud trip. All the details are wrong. The woman in front of me begins to shake her head, and then releases a volley of curses in a language I don’t speak, though the gist is clear enough. Junkie, she’s saying. Get lost, you stupid.

But she’s not talking to me, is looking past me, over my shoulder. “You,” she calls into the dark parking lot. “You. You junkie. Get away from there.”

Now, I turn. The parking lot behind me is bathed in the headlights of a parked SUV. Someone lurches through plumes of exhaust toward another car. My car. It is still running. The figure moves with the spastic, disoriented energy of a user. Juni. I wheel, and catch my foot and trip, falling hard: chin to pavement, skull rattled. From my stunned position, I force myself up. My car door hangs open, the interior shadowed. I cannot locate the figure.

The old woman points. “You damn junkie. You want me to call cops?”

Then, there he is, by the door of a parked SUV, clutching a bundle. He tosses it inside. No cry. I lurch toward him. He slams the door and then, in the sudden flash of his headlights, my car is illuminated. I see Juni, still resting on the plastic seat, snoring and drooling, utterly undisturbed. It’s only the diaper bag, the stupid diaper bag he’s taken. My heart is in pieces. What have I done? What had I almost done?

The world wants to take her from me, this I know. Juni is nothing I’ve earned and no one I deserve. I’ve done the worst thing a mother can do to her child, and done it again and again. Someone will take her from me. Maybe someone should. I wrap my baby up in my arms, breathe in the milky funk of her smell. Never, I tell her. Never again.

The old woman staring down at me. “You people,” she says. “You think can fool me. But I know fiend when I see fiend. I don’t trust for a minute.”

Come on. Someone is tugging at her from behind, the figure unidentifiable, a nurse or a son, a husband or an aide. Someone is at the old woman’s shoulder. Come watch your show, the voice urges. She gives me a last glare, then nods and allows herself to be drawn back into the warm light of her apartment.

For a moment, the person remains in the doorway, a vague shadow. “Call Emily,” I think I hear, but I don’t trust me for a minute, either. And then the door closes.

Juni coughs in my arms, the cool air and the wake of panic. It’s not the details I’m missing. It’s the very heart. I hold her, gently, delicately, afraid, and then I begin to rock her, my grip tightening until she is secure in my arms. Her breathing eases, a warm patch spreading from where her mouth rests against my shirt. This is my daughter, I think. This is where I am.

I have not used, but how close I am, still and always. How close and easy is a return. I wrestle my phone from my pocket, balancing my stirring child as I do. Fucking call. Fucking call. Fucking call. Fucking call.

“Mellie,” says Emily, my first and only sponsor, the woman who got me sober when nothing else would. She swallows exhaustion from her voice. “Where are you? Are you at a bar?”

Silence fills the phone line and Emily waits.
“I hate it here,” I say, meaning a thousand other things, a thousand heres I hate.
“Great,” says Emily. The bedclothes shift as she hoists herself up, the moisture of her mouth as she ungums her lips from sleep. “Oh, kid. You’re doing so great. Now tell me where you are.”
The light in the window in front of me blinks out. I hold the phone between my chin and my shoulder as I nestle Juni back into the seat.
“I’m just getting home,” I slide in on the driver’s side, shift, give the car a little gas. It rolls wetly from the parking lot. Juni, covered in applesauce, spoon lost in the seat cushions, releases a few gasping coughs. Emily delivers her platitudes, her one day at a times and her easy does its. The morning isn’t far. Newspaper trucks rumble past me in the darkness and when I reach my street, I’ve made my first month clean.

Fish Out of Water