TRUTH 4: WHERE IS THE EARTH? 4 page

HOSPITALS

I’d seen her with hep, I’d seen her stoned, I’d seen her happy, angry, beautiful, really sick. But not this, whatever it was. Candy stood leering at me. She seemed no different from anyone else in there. At first I couldn’t even tell if she recognized me. I suppose it was a grin but it looked like a leer.

“Hi, Candy,” I said. I felt the hesitancy in my voice.

She’d lost twenty or thirty pounds. It was worse than the time she’d had hep. She looked like a bag lady, the way her clothes hung off her. A purple dress, a cardigan. Her collarbone jutted out. She stood suspended, as if about to begin a step. Trembling, swaying. Her own pupils were so big that I could barely see the blue I’d always loved. And the smell. Candy had always been the bath queen. Now there was the faint stench of something putrid. Not only the odor of stale sweat, but something I couldn’t clearly identify.

Everything was wrong.

“Hi!” she whispered conspiratorially, holding my gaze and smiling.

“Are you okay?”

“Phew,” she exhaled, shrugging her shoulders, her head bobbing, her fingers fidgeting. “I am not okay.”

I took one hand in my hands, squeezed it tight. A thick film of sweat covered her skin.

“Shit, Candy. I don’t know what to say. What happened?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she whispered. “What’s going on? Why am I here?”

She was pretty zonked on psych drugs, trying to smile but distressed, her lips quivering.

“I’ll get you out of here in no time. Things’ll be okay.”

“Can I come now? Can I come with you?”

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. I don’t think you can, baby. I don’t know what the story is. Can I smoke here?”

“Out here,” she said, and led me to a crowded TV room, the air blue with smoke. She started introducing me to everyone. I couldn’t see the point. A couple of the men shook hands, wouldn’t let go, stared into my eyes with the earnestness of the vacant. An enormous woman lifted her head from her chest. Her head wobbled as she looked at me and spittle drooled from her mouth. She spoke in a sedated drawl, as if the air could barely make it from her lungs into the room.

“Is—this—ya—boy—friend?”

We squeezed onto a vinyl couch. Everybody turned their heads to listen. I tried to whisper.

“Baby, what happened?”

“I don’t know. But guess what I found out in here?”

“What?”

“Don’t tell anyone. You can’t tell anyone, okay?”

“Okay. What?” She was deadly serious, so I leaned forward.

“My father is not my father.”

I put my face in my hands and I furrowed my brow. Then I looked up. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“Mel Gibson’s father is my father. I’m Mel Gibson’s sister. I’m really Hayley Mills.”

I paused. My mind was racing. I was about to say, “Candy, you’re talking shit,” but too many things were happening at once.

Instead I said, “How do you know this?”

“Someone in here told me. It makes sense now.”

“Candy,” I said.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me up. “Here, I’ll introduce you to the girl who told me.”

We went back out into the rec room. A pale-skinned, dark-haired girl sat curled in a tight ball on a couch in the corner.

“Helen, this is my husband.”

The girl gave no glimmer of recognition. She seemed catatonic, shaking her head and repeating over and over, “Nnnnn. Nnnnn. Nnnnn,” rocking backward and forward and staring at the floor.

“She only speaks to me,” Candy said. “Don’t you see? She would know.”

I sighed and held her hand. My whole chest felt constricted. In all the rush of thoughts, the one that stood out was that it was my fault. I should never have gone away.

“Candy, things are fucked-up. I’m sorry, baby. We’re going to fix this up. You’ll get better, we’ll get better, everything’ll get better. I’ll get you out of here soon. We’ll go back to the farm. We’ll just calm down.”

She started crying then. I hugged her tight and understood the real meaning of the phrase “bag of bones.” I concentrated all the pain into my head—that way I didn’t cry. I didn’t want Candy to think that things were worse than they were.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” I said. There they were again, those words.

Candy was the coolest junkie I’d ever known and the person I’d loved most in my life. I wasn’t prepared for what was happening. It seemed a quantum leap from everything’s turning blue to this. And yet everything around me, in this mental hospital, was undeniably real.

They let me out of the locked section. I located the admitting psychiatrist and sat in his office for five minutes. He used a lot of technical terms, like “psychotic episode” and “manic-depressive.” He told me she’d been sectioned for her own safety. None of it meant much, not compared to what Peter and Michael would later tell me, about what actually happened down there on the farm in the last couple of weeks. Candy demanding they close all their blinds, to keep the sun out, to keep things blue. Candy explaining that the sun was a god that was trying to kill her. Candy pleading with them to take their money out of their banks, as the world was about to collapse and electronic systems would no longer work. Candy sleeping in the shed because the cats had told her to get out. Candy running naked through the back paddock, telling Peter and Michael, when they finally coaxed her down from a tree, that clothes hurt her skin. At which point Peter, unable to find me, had called Candy’s parents.

I walked out into the sunlight. Candy’s parents were sitting in the car. They got out when they saw me coming. I sucked in my breath as I approached, felt it whistle between my teeth. I’d gone inside thinking, We’ll fix this, and they probably knew that I’d be coming out a little different.

I heard my shoes crunch on the gravel. I couldn’t feel my body. I wanted to melt into liquid, flow down the path and into the gutter, disappear into the earth. But I wanted to hold myself together too. I figured that when you gave up smack, the penance must begin. Obviously this was the first task. It was the Catholic coming out in me. I didn’t know that things can get better too.

We didn’t say anything. Candy’s parents looked at me expectantly.

“Well …” I shrugged, and then two strangled sobs emerged, unexpectedly, from deep in my throat. I lowered my head and splayed my hand over my eyes.

Candy’s dad put his hand on my shoulder and half hugged me, the way men do, with absolute awkwardness. Then I cried a little more, for maybe thirty seconds. He patted me on the back and said, “There, there.” He was a nice guy, and the thought that he might be in my life in the future, if it ever worked out with Candy and me, was like an oasis in this desert of dread.

The rest was a long haul, but not such a long story. I stayed on the fold-out sofa bed at Candy’s parents for a couple of weeks. In the morning I’d wander over to feed the ducks on the lake in the park across the road. I’d smoke a big joint and wonder where my life was going to go and what would happen to Candy.

It occurred to me that I owed it to Candy to stick by her, no matter what happened. But then it occurred to me more strongly that Candy, should she ever get through this, would no doubt have the sense and strength to see that she was better off without me. I knew that even if I could change, as in really stop using dope once and for all, there was still a past that was fucked-up and wrong. It had never really occurred to me that for a long time love may have only been loyalty, and that work, Candy’s work, was degradation, pure and simple. How effectively I’d blocked it out became apparent as the methadone withdrawals began to taper away. Maybe the only way to make an amend for all that was to let her walk off to her future, should she choose.

In the early afternoon I would visit her at the hospital. She was moved out of the locked ward after a week. After a while she was less crazy, but so heavily sedated that she was just not there. We talked about taking it easy when we got back to the farm. I saw all the antidepressants and antipsychotics as the new problem, but the doctors took me aside and assured me that these things would be necessary for a period of time. It was Candy with no spark. They were telling me I had to accept that. That the alternative was Mel Gibson’s sister, messages from the CIA, and a gradual buildup of the anger and anguish I’d seen in the months before I left. They told me we’d done a big thing, coming off heroin and then methadone after all those years. Don’t give yourselves a hard time, they said.

Later each afternoon I would feed the ducks again and smoke another joint. Then I’d come home, have dinner and a glass of wine with Candy’s parents, make small talk, watch a bit of TV, and go to bed, hoping I would sleep, though I didn’t much.

The first time I went back to the farm, it was like the cats had all gone wild. I don’t know what they’d been eating. They were almost hysterical, clustering around me frantically as I fed them. The whole house was overrun with fleas.

Coco was skinny now, and when she finished eating I followed her into the spare room. She nosed her way into a pile of old clothes and I could hear the tiny squeaking of kittens only a few days old. It was a magic moment, a patch of softness in my brittle life. I reached my hand in to stroke them as they flailed toward their mother’s breasts. But one seemed to be asleep. I rubbed its head with my finger, then recoiled as I realized that the head was all there was. The body was gone. The kitten’s head rolled out and landed on the floor.

I stared in horror at the raw pink patch that was its neck, where the head had been bitten off at the shoulder. I didn’t know then that when a cat is malnourished it will sacrifice one kitten in order to let the others live. Candy’s mother explained that later. All I knew was that this was awful, and I didn’t know how many more awful things I could take.

I picked up the head and carried it outside, balancing it gingerly in the palm of my hand, careful not to make contact with the wet pink insides of its neck. I took a good windup and launched it like a catapult over the windbreak and well out into the field. The wind seemed to help it along. The tiny head landed and bounced several times and disappeared behind a tuft of grass. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” though I don’t know who it was directed at. And then I stood there for a long while and didn’t move or make a sound, other than the occasional dry sob.

Candy came out at last, fragile and scared of the world, and I picked her up and brought her back to the farm. In the final week, before Peter and Michael had called her parents, she’d written strange poems, meticulously lettered with nail polish, all over the walls and doors. They said things like, “Mother of the blueness. Angel of the storm. Remember me in my opaqueness. Of the flooding. Hit me up. Dear Mother says you were born in Vietnam. Whistle down the wind (Alan Bates). You said you would look after me. Fly away sun.”

I found some old cans of paint in the shed, all different colors, and tried to paint over the poems. I didn’t prepare the surfaces or use an undercoat. My heart wasn’t in it. The inside of the house looked like a strange patchwork, and as the paint began to dry, the faint outlines of the poems reappeared, like the return of ghosts.

In the first months, Candy slept up to sixteen hours a day. The doctors said it was okay, a natural side effect of the drugs. When she was awake, she shuffled slowly through the house. Our lives didn’t seem exciting. We had nothing to talk about. We were utterly trapped by the heavy weight of lethargy.

No matter how hard she tried, Candy just couldn’t stay awake past eight o’clock each night. I thought if we could just stay up together, sharing the experience of watching TV, it would mean something.

“Please stay, Candy, the fire’s going, we’ll watch this show.”

“I’m sorry,” she’d say, “I can’t hold my eyes open anymore.”

I’d kiss her good night. Often she’d cry and say, “This is so awful.” I’d sit on the couch and smoke cigarettes—the buds were long since gone—and watch bad television long into the night.

One night I stood up and walked outside, past the windbreak of pine trees and into the paddock beyond, where I’d thrown the kitten’s head. The countryside was all around, utterly dark and silent. I lay down in the wet long grass and looked up at the night sky strewn with stars. I thought, If the universe is infinite, if there are stars in all directions, then why isn’t the night sky entirely white? The answer, I knew, was that this is the local galaxy, in the local cluster. Everything was local. Everything else: too far away. The light would never reach us. Local pain was all we’d ever know. My entire life seemed weightless, and yet I felt pinned down, as if the night were a weight of pain pressing on my chest. At least with heroin we’d had a purpose. Yet I sensed, at last, clearly, the worthlessness of the world I had constructed.

The farm was too fucking depressing. Even Candy, on the psych drugs, thought so. Almost as quickly as we’d got it, we sold it, and hightailed it out of the battlefield. We gathered our straggly lives and moved back to Sydney, to start afresh. We only had one agreement: no smack.

Within six months Candy came off the psych drugs completely. It was as if the very color that came back into her cheeks was flooding into her soul as well. For the first time in all those years, she started going back to acting classes. She began to laugh a lot, like she had when I first met her. We were in Sydney, where we’d started so long before. It seemed we might have a second chance, might be able to make up for lost time, to turn bad fortune into good. I got my first real job in many years, as a kitchen hand in a busy pub restaurant.

It was good, in a way. It should have been good. But I felt I was sitting in a little wooden boat that had been cut adrift from a big ship. The boat was leaking and I had no oars. I felt a big hole in my gut, the one that heroin had always filled, and I didn’t know how to live. What could I do in that boat? Dip my hand in the ocean, drink salt water? I knew it would make me sick.

And then I bumped into Casper again.

Casper was in Sydney now, working on enzyme inhibitors in the research division of a big inner-city hospital, staying late each night and brewing up the Jesus-in-a-jar. I’d lost touch with him entirely and our meeting was accidental. It was his lunch break and he was striding along a busy street in a white lab coat.

I saw him from a distance and stopped still. Chemistry tingled up my spine, and even in the mere anticipation I felt I’d been descended upon by the doves of absolute peace. He was lonely in the new city and happy to meet an old friend.

I thought to myself, Just this once. It’s been so long now. Almost six months. “Hey, Casper! How’s it going?” Ten minutes later I was struck by the thunderous heat once more. Dumbstruck. But just this once.

That was a Monday. By the Friday I was edgy, so I called him again. On Sunday I woke up and his phone number was in my head and my hands were lifting the telephone. You know the story. Candy said I broke the rules. She said she was going back to Melbourne if it kept happening. After two weeks I couldn’t stop. Once the wiring’s there, I guess it’s like a switch. Bang, you flick it on.

Candy gave me a couple more warnings. Then she said, “This is a definite decision. You’re using. I’m going back to Melbourne.”

It was almost sad, the lack of animosity. There was not even much to divide. One day she kissed me good-bye and climbed into a rented car laden with her possessions and said, “I hope it’s only temporary. I have to go.” Her eyes glanced back at me in the rearview mirror as she pulled away, but I couldn’t read them anymore.

So then I was left alone, in a flat where I stopped paying rent, and Casper—can you believe this?—got sloppy, and got caught. He was a good research scientist, and hospitals hate scandals, so they gave him one chance and sent him to detox and threatened him with police action if it happened again.

But Casper lasted three days in detox. He must have been thinking, How can I possibly stay here, in all this pain, when I still have the key to my lab? He must have also known that leaving detox was the end of his career.

He left anyway. He went to a doctor, and then a pharmacy, and then a liquor store. It was a Saturday; there was no one in the research division. He cooked one final batch. He downed a packet of Serepax and drank a bottle of scotch and had a big shot of Jesus and out he went.

Leaving me, as I saw it, in the absolute fucking cold.

I really didn’t have much energy left. I just couldn’t contemplate returning to crime, to being a petty criminal with a petty habit. I couldn’t even contemplate trying to get a lab together again: it was all I could do to gather each day’s scoring money. Even working as a kitchen hand had made me think there might be a better life.

Casper was gone and I was reduced to scoring shitty deals off shitty dealers. Candy was gone too, maybe forever. It was clear to me that there was no pleasure anywhere in my life. Even when I used, even if the dope was good, I didn’t seem to get relief anymore. I’d have the shot, and feel the little rush, then straightaway find myself in the middle of a fidgety low-key fear, about how I was going to obtain my next one. The high point of my day, the apex of anticipation, was when I got the dope in my hand. After that I knew it was all downhill.

I trudged the streets unhappily. I avoided going home to my empty flat, where the only knock on the door was likely to be the landlord’s.

This was the time of the world being gray. Even Lex wouldn’t lend me money anymore. One day I got home to my flat and the locks were changed. I broke a window and climbed inside but all my stuff was gone.

I took to sleeping in doorways. For days I lived on chocolate bars: Fry’s Five Fruits, Rocky Roads, Cherry Ripes. Good stuff for energy, easy to steal. I needed all my money, which wasn’t much, for heroin. Then some ancient Social Security fraud I’d forgotten about caught up with me. My check wasn’t in the bank when it should have been, and I learned I’d been cut off welfare.

And so at last it was my turn for the hospital, the thing I’d been putting off for so long. One day I just walked to a detox, somewhere along Moore Park Road, and pressed the buzzer.

Detox. I’d never even liked the sound of the word. I’d only ever preferred tox and more tox. And now here I was.

They told me the first step toward change was not to use any drugs at all. It was so simple that I’d never thought of it. Swapping one drug for another, that was as far as I’d ever gone. What I liked about their advice was that not using anything seemed just as extreme as using the amounts I’d been using. An extreme solution for an extreme situation. It was okay by me. And when I stopped using, they said, then the changes could begin to occur. Look at your life, they said. Try not to kid yourself anymore. If you stop using and stay stopped, you have a chance to open out your future in ways you can’t imagine. You even have a chance to clear some of the wreckage of your past. One day you might try to contact your father, for instance. “I suppose that’s possible,” I said. “I suppose I could think about that.”

I gave myself over to all these extraordinary new concepts. The swirling in my head was almost unbearable as it gathered force each evening and built into a cyclone by dawn. For nine long nights I didn’t sleep a minute, racked by spasms and nervous electricity in a sweat-soaked bed in the men’s ward of the detox. I stayed for three weeks, moving like a sleepwalker each day through dream states of delirium beyond pleasant and unpleasant. The pain, at last, was beautiful.

I thought I’d been running, and that exhaustion had pursued me relentlessly across the years. Instead I arrived at exhaustion. “I’ve never moved a muscle,” it said. “All I ever did was wait here for you to come.”

I surrendered to my tiredness. On the eleventh day of my delirium, alone in the hospital courtyard, I found myself smiling, so astonished had I suddenly become by the mere fact of eleven days. Could I turn eleven into twelve? A counselor passed by. “So why are you smiling?” she asked.

And all I could say, with a heart full of hope, was, “I have no idea in the wide world.” It was a good enough starting point.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 646