White Oleander

NIKI TORE OFF a square of the acid and put it on my tongue, then one for her. It came on small sheets of paper printed with pink flamingos on motorcycles. We sat on the porch, looking at the wreck of the neighbor's old Riviera parked up on blocks. The weather was heating up, hazing over, tepid as bathwater, moist as a wet sock. I felt nothing at all. "Maybe we should take another one." If I was going to do it, I wanted to make sure I'd get off. Yvonne thought we were crazy to mess with our heads this way, but I was just crazy enough now. Susan D. Valeris had called me three times already. I stopped answering the phone, told Rena to hang up on anyone asking for me.

 

"It takes a while," Niki said. "You'll know when it happens. Believe me, you won't sleep through it."

 

Nothing happened for almost an hour, I was sure the stuff was no good, but then it came on, all at once, like an elevator. Niki laughed and waved her hand in front of my face, the fingers leaving trails behind them. "High enough now?"

 

My skin felt hot and prickly, like I'd broken out in a rash, but my skin looked the same. It was the sky that had suddenly changed. It had gone blank. Blank as a cataract, an enormous white eye. I felt anxious under that terrible empty sky. It was as if God had gone senile and blind. Maybe he did not want to see anymore. That made sense. All around us, everything was the way it usually was, only unbearably so. I tried never to think about how ugly it was here. I tried to find the one beautiful thing.

 

But on this drug, I found I couldn't shut it out, focus down. It was terrifying. I was overwhelmed by the sordid and abandoned, growing like a hellish garden, the splintered step, the four dead cars in the neighbor's weedy lot, rusting back to earth, the iron fence of the prop outlet topped with razor wire, the broken glass in the street. It occurred to me that we lived exactly at the bottom of L.A., the place where people dumped stolen cars and set them on fire. The place where everything drifting came to rest. I felt sick, my skin burned. There was a metal taste in my mouth as if I'd chewed foil. In the street, I noticed a dead bird, smashed flat, surrounded by its soft feathers.

 

I was afraid to tell Niki I was scared, it occurred to me if I named it, I might start screaming. I might never stop.

 

The whole world had been reduced to this, lifeless debris. And we were just more of the city's detritus, like the bird, the abandoned shopping carts, the wrecked Riviera. I could feel the hum of the high power lines, the insidious radiation mutating our cells. Nobody cared about the people down here. We were at the end of civilization, where it had given up out of senility and exhaustion. And we were what was left, Niki and I, like cockroaches after the end of the world, scuttling through the ruins, fighting over scraps of the dead corpse. Like my dream of my mother's melted face. I was afraid to ask if my face was melting. I didn't want to call attention to it.

 

"You okay?" Niki had hold of a handful of my hair at the nape of my neck, pulled gently.

 

I shook my head, infinitesimally, I couldn't even be sure whether I had done it or just thought I had. I was afraid to do more.

 

"Don't worry," she said. "You're just coming on."

 

She was turning into a jack-in-the-box, a Raggedy Ann. I had to hold on to the fact that I knew her, it was only a trick of my mind. This was Niki, I kept telling myself. I knew her. Abandoned at six by her mother at a Thrifty drugstore in Alhambra, Niki always counted the house, assessed the odds, worked out percentages. I liked to watch her when she was getting ready for work, with her starched Bavarian waitress costume on, looking like Heidi in a Warhol film. Even if I did not recognize her, I knew her. I had to hang on to that.

 

I was sweating, cracking up like the decades-old paving job in the smeared linoleum sun.

 

"Can we get out of here?" I whispered, trembling, nauseated. "I hate this. I mean, really."

 

"Just tell me where," she said. Her eyes looked strange, black and buttony, like a doll's.

 

IN THE COOL HUSH of the Impressionist rooms at the County Art Museum, the world was restored to me, in all its color and light and form. How had I forgotten? Nothing could happen to me here. This was the port, the outpost of the true world, where there could still be art, and beauty, and memory. How many times had I walked here with Claire, with my mother. Niki had never been here before. The two of us walked past fishing boats rocking at anchor, luminescent lemony gold white skies shading to rose, foreground reflections in the watery street.