White Out (31 page)

The next day the temperature rose right through the fifties and hit sixty-five, where it remained for the whole afternoon. A lot of snow melted, and in the middle of the large fields that surrounded the treatment center you could see the tallest of the brown grass blades poking through. People went outside to smoke without their coats. Tony—who may have been a murderer—even went outside without his shoes. The counselors looked worried, ready for anything. It was as if the day had come loose and dropped out of January, dropped out of the calendar.

The day it hit sixty-five, I sensed the weather before I woke. I slept very deeply now. My sleep was intricate, like a bookful of sentences written one over the other. The way to waking was slow. There were maybe three half or fake wakings before my eyes opened.

The morning of the thaw I first saw the new light on the false walls of a half waking. I emerged from sleep into a sunny castle room. The room was a kind of pre-waking, a dream extension, but I didn’t know that. I felt awake. I was going to meet someone. Her white face flashed back between the black lines of the wall of sleep. I’d been talking with her. Maybe something more. Her prints covered the missing parts of my body. We had an appointment. A meeting on the farthest outskirts of the castle, out where its halls and fountains faded and I could see the hazy outlines of the furniture in my bedroom in the treatment center.

I walked through the castle with long dream steps that hung in the air for several seconds. The secret of flight was in the length of those steps. New, real sunlight spotted my clothes and my arms. It pooled and glittered in my palms. The secret of flight was in it. My half-waking thoughts got tangled. I should hurry. Lieutenant Abelove was right. The way out was obvious. I opened my eyes. The rich light lay over my bed and the treatment center carpet. June light in January. It took me a while to see it was real and I was awake. I got out of bed and put on my clothes.

We ate breakfast in the light. A few hours later, the warm day clouded over. From obvious to secret. After group and before lunch I had a smoke with Peter.

“I just get so afraid,” I said, “that when I get out, well, and then, there’s also the—”

“Just relax,” Peter said. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said cheerfully.

The weird weather made the day go slow. At lunch there were silent minutes between bites. After lunch there was more time. Some people were counting things, days left, for example, or the number of plastic spoons in the drawers. Normally the staff—hypersensitive to boredom prevention—kept the schedule tight and stopped loose time from piling up. But that day we stood around with extra time coming out of our ears.

I got bored. Restless. Sitting around staring at the sky freaked me out, but sitting around bored, I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Marty and Al went to play pool in the rec center; I wanted to get some exercise in the open. I went outside and started walking, alone and without a coat, eyes rolling along the ground like dice. The air tasted like ashes. I walked until I couldn’t see the treatment center. A huge crow flapped slowly by, maybe six feet above the ground. It startled me. The low clouds were in its feathers, and it flew soundlessly.

I found a small cast-iron chair abandoned out in the center of a field. It must have been covered by snow until the thaw. Now its old-fashioned metal curlicues were bare and warm. I sat down in it. I looked out at the low, heavy, warm sky, the masses of trees at the lake’s edge, the wet edges of the lake ice.

I sat exposed there for a quarter hour, then walked back. My skin itched in the uncanny winter mugginess. My steps were slow to pull out of the wet snow. I felt like I’d forgotten something and walked back a little, then forgot and walked forward. The crow came back so I didn’t have to remember it.

When I got to the unit I opened the journal the treatment center had given each of us and I wrote down what was inside me. It took me a long time. I would write a little. Then I’d wait and think and wonder. And then I’d write a little more. Each line had two words on it, two secret words. This is what I wrote:

I read this today and wonder, why witches? Why magic? I don’t know for sure, but I have an idea.

The only way to recover from the memory disease is to forget yourself. You see, I was in a memory trap. In order to get out I had to forget myself. In order to forget about myself, I had to be sure there was something outside to grab on to. But the memory disease had trapped all of my senses. I couldn’t see outside. In order to get even a glimpse of what’s outside, I had to forget myself completely.

You see? It goes in circles, it’s impossible. How can I see what’s outside if I have to turn away from what’s inside to see it and I can’t let myself turn away from the inside until I can see what’s outside?

Witches. Magic. The little crackle of energy left around the chair and the crow came from the force with which the outside was thrown into me.

CHAPTER 15

O
n the plane home from the treatment center it happened again. I woke up from a nap next to a cloud. Blinking in a blue space that wasn’t inside me.

At the treatment center they’d talked a lot about a Higher Power who was supposed to suck me out of myself like a vacuum. But it looked to me like a pretty Low-Powered vacuum would do the trick. A nap, for instance. Maybe the point was not the Strength that broke me out of myself but the Weakness that kept me inside. Kept me barely. Who am I?
A person can be cured of anything
, I thought. I shivered.

When I got home, all everyone could say was how much better I looked. “Everyone” was my father, my mother, my stepmother, my sister, my brother, my half brother, my half sister, and Cash, who was living nearby. Well, my half sister didn’t tell me how good I looked. She was six months old and couldn’t really talk yet. My half brother Ryan was two. He took a little while to put his sense of my transformation into words.

“Ryan, don’t you have something to say to your big brother?”

“I got candy today.”

“Yes, but isn’t there something else?”

“B…b…baseball card.”

“Something about Michael?”

Silence. Loud whispers from Dad to Ryan.

“You look very better,” Ryan said. Everyone smiled at me. I smiled back.

I’d returned to a world of children. Soft food. Small words said slowly. It had been agreed that I would stay in my father’s basement until my legal problems had been sorted out and I got my bearings and could think about either writing my dissertation or getting a real job. I didn’t have to make any decisions right away. Although I hadn’t done any work in months, I was still on a dissertation fellowship. I was getting monthly checks, and didn’t need to make an appearance on campus for another half year. Which was fortunate, because I wasn’t supposed to leave the state.

I put my bags down in the small basement bedroom. The room was dense, with pink carpet, a couple hundred books in neat piles on the floor, and a small folding table holding my computer monitor and keyboard. A narrow crack under the door let in the ghost of children’s voices from upstairs. A high thin window above the bed let in the day’s ghost. It was there every day. At 5:00 p.m. I would watch it disappear on the far wall. It never woke me, but when I woke it was there. On overcast days it was less a presence than an absence. A rectangle lifted from the room’s heavy gray. Over the six months I stayed in Chicago, I grew to think of that rectangle of light as a single friendly ghost—awake each morning, asleep each night. Good morning, ghost!

When you live underground, the light that comes through the only window is significant.

When I went aboveground myself, it was almost too much. In those early days I was still drunk on the feeling of freedom from withdrawal on the one hand, and from narcotic coma on the other. The air was too strong; the light was too strong. I’ve always loved what is too strong for me, but I can’t take too much. For the first week I wore myself out with air and light and slept for twelve hours a day like a baby. After that I spent more time inside and underground. I spoke to no one but Cash and family, and mostly to the little kids.

Kids have always liked me, perhaps because I take a genuine interest in what interests them. I bet that dinosaur could kill that tank. What about an airplane? No, dinosaurs can’t kill airplanes. Maybe a helicopter. It was healthy for me to be around them. Spiritual. In their world, death was something that could happen to you many times. Like tanks or dinosaurs. You could die a thousand times every second. The kids had positive attitudes. They didn’t even smoke.

But sometimes seeing an unfocused stare in a child’s eye, or hearing a fascinated childish inhalation, disturbed the oldest memories I had, which turned and touched others, which had words attached to them, and words are the halo of the white thing. I had to go to my room. I turned off my light so I wouldn’t be disturbed and read self-help books by the light of the ghost’s face. Every day a new one.

I ate tuna-fish sandwiches every morning at Panera. I didn’t know about their high mercury content then, but I’m not sorry. I think mercury helps kill the memory disease. If I ever open a treatment center, it will serve tuna every day. On Tuesdays I would take Ryan to Chimpy’s. This was a rundown, kid-themed restaurant with a pen filled with colored plastic balls and little mechanical animals that the kids could ride on. If you put in a quarter, the metal animals vibrated a little, or rose three inches into the air, or played dead. There was an alligator, a giraffe, a tiger, and a horse. They were all covered in dyed fur. Even the alligator.

“You know alligators don’t have fur, Ryan,” I told him. As an educated person, I felt responsible.

“Yes, they do,” he said. He pointed to the alligator’s dyed green fur.

“Yes, but that’s not an alligator,” I said.

“It looks like an alligator,” he said.

“But it’s not,” I responded.

“Then what do you call it?” he asked.

“We should get going, Ryan,” I said.

“What is it called?” he persisted.

“Well, we call it an alligator. But we don’t believe it.”

I tried to teach Cash some things too.

“You know, Cash,” I said one day when we were having coffee. “You should stop smoking pot.”

“I don’t have a problem with pot,” he said.

“Then why don’t you stop smoking it?”

“Later,” he said.

“Now!” I said.

“Look, Mike.” He sighed. “I know you’ve stopped using heroin, and you stopped using everything else because you think it’ll put you back on dope, and I think that’s great for you. You’re doing a lot better. Just keep doing what they tell you; it’s working for you. But stay away from me with that bullshit. My problem was with alcohol, and pot helps keep me sober.”

“You know how insane that sounds, Cash? The fact is that—”

“Shove those treatment center facts, man. I’ve been sober and doing good for three years and you were strung out six weeks ago, so chill.”

“What, so you think that recovery is just bullshit? That everyone relapses?” My voice went up an octave and I felt a little panicky.

“No, Mike. Everything is going to be just fine,” Cash said cheerfully.

The fact was that Cash taught me a lot more than I could teach him. He taught me some good habits. My only habits were taking Ryan to Chimpy’s and eating tuna fish every day at Panera. That left me with about eleven hours of blank air to process. It didn’t bother me; I was collecting outside moments. Like the chair and crow at the treatment center, the cloud on the plane, a couple others. I tried to explain to Cash.

“Does that kind of thing happen every day?” he asked.

“Well, no, but it’s like a promise of—”

“You need something that happens every day.”

He was right. I needed something that happened every day. You don’t forget yourself all at once, I reminded myself. The mercury in the tuna helps, but it’s not enough. You must make forgetfulness into a habit. Like a waterwheel that continually pours forgetfulness over your life.

I set a few waterwheels going. I began to exercise. My father had a treadmill in the large open space in the basement outside my bedroom, and I started using it. I put on headphones and played trance music and ran and sweated and in the ghost light I imagined I was the president. I had never really gone in for regular exercise. It bored me to death, to be honest. The trance music made the running bearable, and imagining I was the president for some reason made the trance music seem less…feminine. If that’s the right word. Sometimes I had to trick myself to get me under the waterwheels of my new habits.

My exercise habit was so successful I started some others. I started doing a little regular work on my dissertation. I got into the habit of going to NA meetings. I brushed my teeth regularly. I checked my email. I had tuna for lunch and something else for dinner and two snacks. Sometimes I had tuna for dinner too. I got into the habit of watching a little TV before bed.

Habits are healthy. I never really had any before. Not any real ones. Sometimes people call drug dependency a habit, but this is misleading. That’s really an antihabit. It isolates you from things, where a real habit marries you to things. If I am a body, a habit is like a room containing my body and a bunch of other things. Outside things. A treadmill, a TV, books, snow, dayghosts, relatives, dinosaurs, mercury, an alligator, a toothbrush, a car. The habit picks us up and whirls us together like a tornado. A cartoon tornado. It doesn’t hurt.

Habits are like reunion parties for me and my favorite things that happen every day. Drunken reunion parties where people go home wearing pieces of other people’s clothes. A bit of the treadmill, part of the dayghost, and a trance beat stuck to me as I took a shower and headed out to the NA meeting. After the meeting, a few new faces and some old NA phrases lined the tunnel of my driving habit, where stars, and trees, and a few houses and road signs circled around my bedtime television habit. When I came through the television, washed clean in the way the world looks—the television colors, the satellite weather—I was ready for bed. Sleep.