White Out (10 page)

Everyone looked at me. Marc and Eric suddenly smiled. Elizabeth, Dan, and the other Dan started smiling. “Yesssss!” Dan hissed, pumping his fist. Neal dropped the stick he was holding. Jenny began clapping insanely, then pushed my tricycle over. Ronald Reagan got shot, and my mother would be still crying about it when we went in for dinner a couple hours later. We were going to Candy Land.

“Everyone meet in front of my house tomorrow after breakfast.” It would be almost impossible to wait.

“You have to
remember
,” Elizabeth whispered to the other Dan, poking a sharp stick deep into his side. In doing this, she showed an uncanny wisdom regarding memory. You can’t just expect to remember something, no matter how important it seems at the time. You have to make a place for it in your body. Elizabeth made a place for Candy Land in Dan’s body with her stick, and tomorrow he would be waiting outside my house before anyone else showed up.

In the manic hours before dinner we gave ourselves over to discussing what Candy Land was like. I had no special authority in these discussions. I was just another participant, just as eagerly curious as the rest, advancing my tentative ideas, accepting the criticism of others, and offering my own. Discussion centered on five topics. (1) The size of Candy Land. (2) The Gumdrop Mountains. (3) Time in Candy Land. (4) Ability to take candy back from Candy Land. (5) Relation of Star Wars to Candy Land. No consensus was reached on any of these topics, though almost unbearably exciting possibilities were opened, especially in the discussion of #5.

The older kids were active and eager participants. No one knew exactly what the imminent discovery of Candy Land meant, but it was clear that formerly decisive differences in age could have no significance in this new world. We dispersed at dinner. My mother was red-eyed and explained to us how horrible it was that anyone could shoot the president. They showed the sequence on television. Secret Service leaping around and waving Uzis and shoving Reagan into a car. It was amazingly confusing, but I got the sense that people wore suits to conceal guns. I don’t know how I slept that night.

I don’t know who I was. I was maybe five. I was rather different, and much larger, than I appeared. I’m past thirty now. Maybe today it’s not so intense, but it’s not as if this identity-problem thing stops in childhood, as if it’s a “condition,” like being small. I know people sometimes talk about this trouble with the self as if there is more than one person inside the “I.” As if “I” is like a little town or community. Or they say the “I” is made up of a bunch of different things that are not “I’s,” and it has cracks in it, like a geode. Some even say there is no “I.” Some say God lives in the “I.” Or God is the only “I” and we are always “you.” Some say we die and are reborn ten thousand times every second. Or that the “I” is like a swinging door between different rooms. Or like two helicopter blades spinning so fast they look like one. Or a prison. Or anything you can make a sentence say it is. Or a devil. Or a kind of dog.

I think it’s lots of these and more. For example, I’m writing this. I’m drinking some water. I do this and that. Now I’m happy and now I’m sad. But where exactly do the different states of me stop and start? I’ve never been able to find a seam or a stitch anywhere. Not even between the states most impossible to fit together. Not even the cure for the memory disease. From a distance, to other people, the cure looks like a real break, a real difference between a bad, sick me and a good, cured me. But when I look closer, as I’m looking now, where exactly is the difference? The difference spreads out until it’s hard to see.

Whoever I was, and however I slept, I couldn’t eat my breakfast. Jenny did.

“We’re going to Candy Land today, Mom,” Jenny said.

I glared at her. White all around each iris.

“That’s nice, Jenny. You kids have to remember to take all your stuff inside when you come in. It rained last night and your dad found one of Jenny’s dolls ruined on the sidewalk today when he left for work.”

Jenny began to cry, was comforted, ate some of my untouched breakfast, clapped her hands. Out of control. I had to go to the bathroom. Breakfast plates cleared, dressed and ready. Mom let us outside. The other Dan was waiting on the sidewalk. He looked like he had to go to the bathroom.

“Are we…” he said weakly.

“Candy Land,” I said. I felt like I was going to throw up.

We didn’t have to wait long. I couldn’t have waited. Dan Rest came on his Big Wheel. Neal came on foot. Elizabeth came on foot. Marc and Eric crossed the street under the eyes of their bathrobed mother, then ran up to us. One of the eight-year-olds, to his lasting shame, showed up. He rode up on a large bike without training wheels, looking down, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

With me in the lead, we set off down the block. Candy Land, as I’d specified the night before, was two blocks down. At the big white apartment building on the corner of the next block, which we could see distantly from my house, we would turn right, and when we turned that corner, we would see Candy Land.

I wasn’t lying. I was more like a kind of oracle. I was as hopeful, submissive, and suspicious of the god or thing that spoke through me as any of my companions. A sincere seeker. In retrospect, I’m sure that eight-year-old had actually turned that corner before, but there he was. And he was so old he was already listening to rock music. He even said he had a Billy Idol poster in his room.

The white apartment building grew larger as our little caravan biked, skipped, and jogged forward. I stared wonderingly at the bright façade, impressed by the mystic quality of the white bricks set in one face of a building whose other face turned toward Candy Land.

There was some laughter and talking, chiefly from Jenny and Eric, while we were still on our block, but after we had crossed the deserted street to the next block, everyone was silent. This was new pavement. Unfamiliar squares of lawn, strange mailboxes, strange flowers. Six, almost seven steps between sidewalk cracks here, unusual, inexplicable. It was five on our block.

“This is a really old block,” Marc said in a hushed, astonished voice.

There was no more thinking or wondering, only steps and pushed pedals and breathing. The white building loomed, impossibly solid, built in 3000 B.C. I saw there were four cracks until the corner. Three. Two.

“OK everyone, wait up.” That was Dan, with his admirable American practicality. We waited until Jenny and Eric caught up with us. I looked at Elizabeth. Her mouth was open. Marc was smiling, his face lit by the sun coming off the white apartment building. His small white teeth.

“OK.” We moved forward. The apartment building came to a sharp edge, then stopped. I kept my eyes firmly on the ground, two inches before my feet. I heard nothing but my heart. The sidewalk turned at a right angle and I turned with it. I looked up.

There was a vast white space. Clocks and guns and tricycles were falling slowly somewhere in the whiteness. Rising forever, falling forever. There was a fish wearing a kind of silver belt. It swam closer and I saw its tail was a thumb. It was a human hand. The big hand of the watch pointed at the two.

“Whoa,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chip said.

“Wow,” said Eva. “What time is it?”

“Two.” We all started laughing. The first time you do white tops, the dope feels kind of good as it leaves your body. A kind of tickling, like moving an arm that has fallen asleep.

CHAPTER 5

T
hat was in July of 1997. My diseased memory is like a mummified baby. Whiteness wrapped in whiteness. Like Candy Land, a memory might look dusty with colors, but as I unwind it, it grows white. The first time I did dope is the mummy’s white heart, pumping whiteness. Chip, Eva, and I did it together. We had been inseparable since January. A love triangle. A triangle is a magic shape. A pyramid is a kind of triangle. The ancient Egyptians recognized the sacredness of the space spread open by the triangle’s three points.

In a relationship between two people, there are only two points. The relationship is a straight line between two points. A straight line takes up no space. It is abstract. Spacelessness is the key feature of an intense relationship between two people. The clichés of love relationships between two people (I disappear into you, nothing else exists for me when you enter the room) express this spacelessness.

Lovers see each other’s bodies as doors or windows to somewhere else. Individually, they are still in the world, but their relationship is not. The odd concept of “soul” probably comes from this odd experience of love between two people: I am here but not here. This can be wonderful and uncanny, like nitrous oxide.

In a love triangle, there are no souls or empty spaces, no disappearing. The space stretched between the three points is full, tense, electric. Eva lounges on the couch, turns her wonderful smile on me. I smile back. Chip, pretending to do a crossword puzzle, watches us. As he watches the look pass between her and me, he thickens and charges it. His gaze puts the moment between Eva and me into three dimensions. He keeps it from disappearing. The space between the three people in a love triangle is the most solid space on earth. A body doesn’t cast a shadow there.

It was in this bright space that the white tops first showed up for me. They didn’t show up right away. It took about six months, and it began that January.

January 1997 should have been the start of my final semester in college, but I’d been suspended for the first half of my junior year for disciplinary reasons, so I would have to come back the following fall. January in Oberlin, Ohio, is glacial. If you live in an expensive house, or even in a clean one, it has a certain icy blue grandeur. But if you live in “the filthiest house in America,” it feels like someone spit on you, and you couldn’t or wouldn’t wipe it off. It feels like you wet your pants and sat in them. There’s something sordid about that kind of cold. The smell of stale cigarettes and sour beer. You can see your breath in the living room.

Always a little numb. Like being poorly anesthetized for an operation. Six of us rented rooms in that house, and if you include boy- and girlfriends there were ten to twelve people living there. It was a big old white house on a pleasant corner lot about five blocks from campus. I think a room went for about $180/month, and it included heat, which the devil landlord kept on the low end. The paint was peeling and it had a caved-in look from the outside. Maybe that was an optical illusion from knowing what the inside was like. Really, it didn’t look too bad from the outside.

“The filthiest house in America” wasn’t our idea. We called it “Big Five,” an obscure student name the house had had for years, and which was said to derive from an old Prince Buster ska song. But in early January our neighbors sent in photos of our living room to the
Jenny Jones Show
, which was soliciting participants for a show on the nation’s dirtiest houses and the scumbags who live in them. When the Jenny Jones people got the pictures they sent a camera crew out. They filmed us sitting and talking in the ankle-high pile of empty pizza boxes, cigarette butts, broken glass, used condoms, records, squirt guns, and stiff paintbrushes. They filmed the vintage dentist’s chair, the velvet Elvises, the mannequins. They filmed the beer sludge in the bathroom and the gouge on the wall where a thrown TV had landed. Then they flew three of the pretty girls that lived with us out to Chicago to tape the show.

Ann got picked to go. She was Sparky’s girlfriend. I felt I should have gone instead of her. But she was prettier than me. They wanted the contrast, I guess. One angry woman in the audience called Ann a tramp. Ann looked proud. She was trying to appear educated and superior to such bourgeois name-calling. But on TV she came off as looking proud to be called a tramp.

Part of the Jenny Jones deal was that they did a complete makeover of the ground floor of the house. ServiceMaster came out with masks and work gloves and cleared the place out. Then came the painters and carpet guys and fake plant people and furniture delivery guys. When it was all done, it looked like a doctor’s waiting room. I waited to get high in it.

The whole makeover cost Jenny Jones over twenty thousand dollars. At the end of the semester we would become embroiled in a dispute with our landlord over ownership of the new furniture and Scott and Christian would end up setting it all on fire and throwing it off the roof. We were all middle-class kids, training ourselves for our inevitable drop out of the middle class once we graduated. I remember Christian, drunk at 10:00 a.m., dressed in his white painter’s suit standing nervously next to one of the Jenny Jones painters, looking as if he were auditioning for a working-class job. How about no job? Class feeling is deeper than an ocean.

But that’s in the future, after graduation (the future lasts forever). At the end of that January, I sat gingerly at the edge of one of the new couches. I thumbed through a magazine. I took tiny nibbling bites from a slice of bread I held in one hand. I took large swigs from a bottle of Mylanta. I took smaller swigs from a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Alix sat down across from me. “How’s your ulcer, Mike?” She probably didn’t mean it to sound callous, but it did. And actually she probably did mean it to sound callous. She was my ex-girlfriend, who now, through a series of strange reversals, was living in Big Five. I was still technically involved with a Korean violinist who actually had a Stradivarius. I even held it and drew the weightless bow across the strings. It was worth millions of dollars. The chairman of Mitsubishi or someone like that had bought it for her.

“It sucks, Alix. I can’t drink. And if I can’t drink, I can’t get drunk.” I was eager to talk about it. I felt she was obligated to listen since she’d been there the night the ulcer had erupted. We’d been drinking in a Chinese restaurant when the dull pain that had been throbbing in my stomach for weeks suddenly disappeared. It was gone, then there was a sudden
twist.
I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m kind of partial to this sensation because it is one of the few feelings in my memory the whiteness has never touched.