Wild

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the mornings there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit. I’d wake in Joe’s squalid room implicated by every banal thing: the lamp and the table, the book that had fallen and rested now belly-down and open, its flimsy pages buckled on the floor. In the bathroom, I’d wash my face and sob into my hands for a few fast breaths, getting ready for the waitressing job I’d picked up at a breakfast place. I’d think: This is not me. This is not the way I am. Stop it. No more. But in the afternoons I’d return with a wad of cash to buy another bit of heroin and I’d think: Yes. I get to do this. I get to waste my life. I get to be junk.

But this was not to be. Lisa called me one day and said she wanted to see me. I’d stayed in touch with her, hanging out for long afternoons at her place, telling her glimmers of what I was up to. As soon as I walked into her house this time, I knew something was up.

“So tell me about heroin,” she demanded.

“Heroin?” I replied lightly. What could I possibly say? It was inexplicable, even to me. “I’m not becoming a junkie, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I offered. I was leaning against her kitchen counter, watching her sweep the floor.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said sternly.

“Well, don’t,” I said. I explained it to her as rationally and playfully as I could. It had been only a couple of months. We would stop soon. Joe and I were simply messing around, doing something fun. “It’s summertime!” I exclaimed. “Remember how you suggested that I come here to escape? I’m escaping.” I laughed, though she didn’t laugh along. I reminded her that I’d never had trouble with drugs before; that I drank alcohol with moderation and reserve. I was an experimentalist, I told her. An artist. The kind of woman who said yes instead of no.

She challenged my every statement, questioned my every rationale. She swept and swept and swept the floor as our talk turned into an argument. She eventually became so furious with me that she swatted me with the broom.

I went back to Joe’s and we talked about how Lisa just didn’t understand.

Then, two weeks later, Paul called.

He wanted to see me. Right now. Lisa had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and he’d immediately driven the seventeen hundred miles straight through from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at Lisa’s apartment. It was a warm, sunny day in late September. I’d turned twenty-six the week before. Joe hadn’t remembered. It was the first birthday of my life when not one person had said happy birthday to me.

“Happy birthday,” said Paul when I walked in the door.

“Thank you,” I said, too formally.

“I meant to call, but I didn’t have your number—I mean, Joe’s.”

I nodded. It was strange to see him. My husband. A phantom from my actual life. The realest person I knew. We sat at the kitchen table with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby, the broom with which Lisa had struck me propped against the wall.

He said, “You look different. You seem so … How can I say this? You seem like you aren’t here.”

I knew what he meant. The way he looked at me told me everything I’d refused to hear from Lisa. I was different. I wasn’t there. Heroin had made me that way. And yet the idea of giving it up seemed impossible. Looking Paul squarely in the face made me realize that I couldn’t think straight.

“Just tell me why you’re doing this to yourself,” he demanded, his eyes gentle, his face so familiar to me. He reached across the table and took my hands, and we held on to each other, locked eye to eye, tears streaming first down my face, then down his. He wanted me to go home with him that afternoon, he said evenly. Not for a reunion with him but to get away. Not from Joe, but from heroin.

I told him I needed to think. I drove back to Joe’s apartment and sat in the sun on a lawn chair that Joe kept on the sidewalk outside the building. Heroin had made me dumb and distant from myself. A thought would form and then evaporate. I could not quite get ahold of my mind, even when I wasn’t high. As I sat there a man walked up to me and said his name was Tim. He took my hand and shook it and told me that I could trust him. He asked if I could give him three dollars for diapers, then if he could use my phone inside the apartment, and then if I had change for a five-dollar bill, and on and on in a series of twisting questions and sorry stories that confused and compelled me to stand and pull the last ten dollars I had out of my jeans pocket.

When he saw the money, he took a knife out of his shirt. He held it almost politely to my chest and hissed, “Give me that money, sweetheart.”