Jerome’s extremely hot girlfriend Mya had advised me, “else your ass is going to be up at that storage unit at two in the morning,” but as I walked out the door, lightheaded and buzzed, the drugs were the last thing on my mind. Just the sight of the bundled painting, lonely and pathetic, had scrambled me top to bottom, as if a satellite signal from the past had burst in and jammed all other transmissions.
xi.
THOUGH MY (SOMETIME) DAYS off had kept my dose from escalating too much, the withdrawals got uncomfortable sooner than I’d expected and even with the pills I’d saved to taper I spent the next days feeling pretty low: too sick to eat, unable to stop sneezing. “Just a cold,” I told Hobie. “I’m fine.”
“Nope, if you’ve got a bad stomach, it’s the flu,” said Hobie, grimly, just back from Bigelow with more Benadryl and Imodium, plus crackers and ginger ale from Jefferson Market. “There’s not a reason on the earth—bless you! If I were you, I’d get myself to the doctor and no fuss about it.”
“Look, it’s just a bug.” Hobie had an iron constitution; whenever he came down with anything himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.
“Maybe, but you’ve eaten hardly a bite in days. There’s no point scraping away down here and making yourself miserable.”
But working took my mind off my discomfort. The chills came in ten minute spasms and then I was sweating. Runny nose, runny eyes, startling electrical twitches. The weather had turned, the shop was full of people, murmur and drift; the trees flowering on the streets outside were white pops of delirium. My hands were steady at the register, for the most part, but inside I was squirming. “Your first rodeo isn’t the bad one,” Mya had told me. “It’s around the third or fourth you’ll start wishing you were dead.” My stomach flopped and seethed like a fish on the hook; aches, jumpy muscles, I couldn’t lie still or get comfortable in bed and nights, after I closed the shop, I sat red-faced and sneezing in a tub that was hot almost beyond endurance, a glass of ginger ale and mostly melted ice pressed to my temple, while Popchik—too stiff and creaky to stand with his paws on the edge of the tub, as he had once liked to do—sat on the bath mat and watched me anxiously.
None of this was as bad as I’d feared. But what I hadn’t expected to hit even a quarter so hard was what Mya called “the mental stuff,” which was unendurable, a sopping black curtain of horror. Mya, Jerome, my fashion intern—most of my drug friends had been at it longer than I had; and when they sat around high and talking about what it was like to quit (which was apparently the only time they could stand to talk about quitting), everyone had warned me repeatedly that the physical symptoms weren’t the rough part, that even with a baby habit like mine the depression would be like “nothing I’d ever dreamed” and I’d smiled politely as I leaned to the mirror and thought: wanna bet?
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked