We exited the house into a courtyard that had a raised pool and joined some other smokers around a table next to one of those tall portable patio heaters I associated with touristy restaurants. Some of the partygoers — although this felt less like a party than a place where people were always hanging out — seemed related to Chinati, others were people who lived in town, and some were visiting, friends of Diane’s friend, whose husband, I started to infer, was a director; all of the people in the courtyard were younger than I. A woman whose curly hair I could just tell was red in the dim light handed me the joint and said, “Did you know we’re under one of the darkest skies in North America?”
It was as if, by the time I exhaled, I was already a little too high, my breathing labored, and the speed and cadence of the speech around me hard to follow. I stood up suddenly, but then decided I didn’t want to go back into the light and face the grown-ups, so I sat down again without explanation; I thought the kids were laughing at me. Monika appeared and pulled up a chair beside us; she offered me a cigarette, which I took but didn’t smoke, just rotated in my fingers. Soon more cocaine was being emptied from a plastic bag onto the table, and the woman in the towel and swimsuit was chopping it up with a credit card she’d magically produced; more than the heaters, I suspected drugs were keeping her warm. Part of me said: Do a tiny bump of cocaine and you’ll feel sober, centered, back in control, and probably a little euphoric; the better part of me said, You have a cardiac condition, don’t be an idiot, come down a little and go home. The better part of me easily won the debate: I decided not to do it, but I decided not to do it after I was already looking up from the glass top of the table, having insufflated a small line.
I passed the straw to the intern and waited for the crystalline alkaloid to sober me, and then raise me into a state of preternatural attention, obliterating whatever anxiety I had about having done it. While I waited, I watched the intern whose dinner I’d purchased do three substantial lines in quick succession; I had the vague sense he wanted to impress me. Monika told him, “Hold your horses,” by which she meant something like “take it easy”; everybody laughed at her apt misuse of the proverbial phrase.
I was laughing too — in fact I saw myself from the outside, in the third person, in a separate window, laughing in slow motion — but then, having done such a stimulant, why was I outside of myself; why was time slowing? Before I knew it, I was trying hard to hold on to that question, felt it was the last link between me and my body, but soon the question didn’t belong to me, was just another thing there in the courtyard from which my consciousness was turning away. Then I was a relation between the heaters, the sky, and the blue gleam of the pool, and then I was gone, wasn’t anything at all, the darkest sky in North America. The last vestige of my personality was my terror at my personality’s dissolution, so I clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope ladder back into my body. Once there, I told my arm to move the cigarette to my lips, watched it do so, but had no sense of the arm or lips as mine, had no proprioception. But when I inhaled the smoke — I didn’t know how the cigarette came to be lit — I could recognize it as traveling down into my chest, which was comforting, anchoring; it was the first cigarette I’d had since they’d discovered the dilation. Only after the young woman in the bathing suit said, “K — ketamine — mainly, I thought you knew,” did I hear myself ask: “What the fuck was that?”
I had done very little, and soon I was basically back in my body and in time, although my vision, if I moved my head too quickly, would break down into frames; everybody but Monika and the intern had gone back inside. But the intern, who I believe was also confused about which drug he had ingested, was not doing so welclass="underline" as I watched him he raised his arms in front of his chest as if he were bench-pressing something; his eyes were open but unseeing, his eyelids fluttering; drool was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. Monika said his name, and he managed a groan. To my surprise, she just laughed, said he’d be okay, and left the two of us alone at the table. My mouth felt rubbery, but I managed to say, “You’re going to be fine, it will pass soon,” but he didn’t seem to hear me.
We sat there for I don’t know how long. My plan was to wait for someone to come out and, when I knew the intern wasn’t alone, to say I had to go and wander home, although I wasn’t sure how far my legs could take me. I was practicing my lines in my head—“I have to leave, I have to get up early tomorrow”—when the intern vomited all over himself, not really seeming to notice that he’d done so; he’d probably had a lot to drink. Not sure what to do, I asked him if he was okay, and he mumbled something in which I heard the words Sacramento and death, or maybe debt. I managed to stand up and walked awkwardly back into the house — my coordination hadn’t fully returned — with the idea of getting one of his friends to help him.
The living room, which seemed to have doubled in size, was empty, the music off. How long had we been outside? The kitchen, where I assumed people were, was a mile away, but eventually I got there; only Monika and Diane’s nameless partner were at the table. I had the vague sense I’d surprised them in a moment of intimacy.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“Some people went on a moonlit bike ride,” the man said. “Most went to bed.”
“The intern is sick. And I have to go home. Can somebody help him?”
“He’ll be fine,” the man said.
“He threw up,” I said.
“Good for him,” Monika said. “It will help.” A sadist.
“I have to go home,” I repeated.
“Okay,” said the man, clearly impatient for me to leave the kitchen.
“Can you help me put the intern to bed somewhere and drive me home?” It felt as if I were speaking underwater.
“It’s a short walk.” Now I hated him.
“What is your name?”
“What?”
“What is your name? I don’t know your name. I’ve never known it.” Monika laughed awkwardly. I believe I sounded crazy.
“Paul,” he said, his confusion making it sound like a question.
“Paul,” I repeated, as if confirming it, as if fixing him to his trivial self with a pin.
“You knew that,” he said.
“I swear to you,” I said, lifting a hand to my heart, “I didn’t.” I went to the giant silver refrigerator and opened it and found two cans of lime soda. I took the dish towel that was hanging from its handle and wet it in the faucet. I stopped before I left the room. “Paul,” I said again, basically spitting it, as if the absurdity of the name were readily apparent.
The intern could move his head to look at me when I approached, a good sign. But he was near tears. “I’m freaking out, man. I saw all these things. Horrible.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I said, and opened the cans of soda and put them on the table and then wiped the intern’s face and shirt. “The worst is over. I am with you,” I quoted, “and I know how it is.” He started to cry. He was probably twenty-two years old and far from home. The whole scene was ridiculous, but his fear, and so my sympathy, were genuine.
“Do you think you can walk inside?” I asked, after drinking some of the soda, which was delicious; the intern wasn’t able to muster interest in his. He shook his head no, but I saw he was willing to try. The smell of his button-down shirt was repulsive, and I helped him get out of it, and then threw the sodden thing in the pool. With his arm around my shoulder and mine around his waist, I walked him slowly inside, a parody of Whitman, the poet-nurse, and his wounded charge.