The paste in the freezer had crystallized. I put it in a coffee filter and squeezed the liquid from the filter into another ramekin and drew it up with an old children’s medicine syringe I’d found in a plastic food container in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, among old inhalers and droppers and thermometers. I had given Kate medicine with the syringe when she’d been too young to take it from a spoon. I stood at the kitchen counter and stuck the syringe into my mouth and pushed the plunger about halfway down the barrel. The liquid was cold and acrid. Before any time elapsed for my better self to argue with my lesser self, I pushed the plunger another quarter down the barrel. Just to make sure because that first squirt wasn’t quite halfway, I thought.
“Three-quarters of eight pills; that’s, what? Jesus, it’s like five pills — no, six. Wait, is that right? And those four others. Charlie, you’re going on a ride.”
I shuffled back to the living room. The floor was strewn with tools. The couch was covered in plaster and dust. I tried to read what I’d written on the wall and to follow the equations and improvised ideograms as they drained toward the hole in the plaster which looked pathetic now, fringed in aluminum like a kid’s attempt at a special effect for a homemade science-fiction movie. The first wave of the drugs swelled over my brain and I cursed myself for making such a wreck of the living room, especially the couch, where I wanted to lie down and float away.
“Ha, you just signed up for some housecleaning, Charlie Crosby,” I said. “Ah, Kate, your dad’s as big a jackass as he ever was. Bigger, in fact. Your dad’s a big, stubborn, born-and-bred chump.” I smiled. Kate loved the word “chump.” I used it once to describe someone I’d done a job for and when she heard it she clapped her hands and threw her head back and laughed out loud. “Chump! What’s that?”
“Kind of a jerk,” I said. “Kind of a numbskull. You should look it up in the dictionary.” Kate hauled out the dictionary I kept in the living room next to the couch.
“It’s the sawed-off end of a log,” she said, holding the dictionary up to her face and squinting. Why don’t I get my act together and make an appointment for her at the eye doctor’s? I thought. “It’s like ‘chunk’ and ‘stump’ stuck together! Like a block of wood.”
“A blockhead,” I said. “A block of wood for a head.”
Now I dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and plugged it in and turned it on and yanked the hose from the body and began to drag it back and forth across the top of the couch and the cushions. The white dust was so heavy and fine that the hose just made lines in the fabric.
“Attaboy; make it worse. Good show, old boy,” I said. I teased myself in the cheerful tone of voice I’d used when I was mad at myself but trying to contain my anger in front of Kate.
“Your daughter’s dead, old boy—you stupid shit,” I said. “And you are a wreck of a man with a block for a head.” I sighed and tipped over onto the couch and lay there with the metal vacuum cleaner wand across my chest, listening to the motor whine, feeling its revolutions through the wand. “A block of a head soaked in ether, a stump soaked in turpentine.”
The wind roared and buffeted the house, the vacuum motor whining harmony over it. Somewhere upstairs a storm window rattled in its frame. I felt as if I were spinning head over heels. At some point, I lost consciousness, with the vacuum still running and the storm rolling over Enon like a great, kingdom-sized turbine, tilling up its trees and hedges and fences, toppling tombstones and tearing shutters from their hinges and weather vanes off barn roofs, all while I dreamed my opium dreams.
I came to the next day at noon, already bolting dizzily off the couch, nearly stumbling over the books and bottles. The vacuum cleaner was still running from the night before and its canister burning hot to the touch. I switched it off and the sudden silence made me aware that the noise from its motor had been driving me mad in my sleep for hours. My ears rang in the quiet and it seemed as if I could still hear the vacuum the way that you still see the sun in front of you when you blink after you’ve turned away from it. A bitter, cooked smell wafted up out of the machine.
From what I could see outside the living room window, the yard was strewn with fallen branches and leaves and shingles from the roof. Something like the actual world began to resolve itself out of the oneiric morass in my skull and I made my way to the kitchen. I put on an old pair of sneakers that sat on top of a pile of old newspapers and mail and opened the back door and stuck my head out. The cupola from the garage roof lay splintered on its side in the yard. The trotting-horse weather vane that had been set on top of the cupola was speared upside down in the grass a few yards away. Four of the windows in the garage doors were broken. Glass and bricks and shingles and tree limbs were scattered across the driveway. I stepped outside and walked around the back of the house. Pillars of sunlight burst down from between the speeding clouds, swept across the landscape, and swung back up into their billowy bays. The wind ran smooth and strong behind the storm and smelled clean and sweet and invigorating, as if it were cleaning up in the hurricane’s wake and not the tail of the hurricane itself, or as if it were a signal that the hurricane trailed behind itself that said the violence was over and calm and safety and order were spreading back over the world. One of the maple trees had toppled and glanced off the back corner of the house, where Kate’s room was. I stepped back from the house into the yard to get a look at the roof. Half of the shingles had been blown off. A dozen bricks had broken loose from the top of the chimney, giving it the look of a crenellated castle tower. The yard smelled rich and earthy. Sparrows flew around and chirped and found food and grass and twigs to repair their nests with. The stark blue sky and the churning, retreating clouds and the cascading sun and the bright green grass and livid blond pith wood gleaming from the broken ends of fallen limbs and the wounds in the sides of the maple trees and the silvery-gray clear rainwater collected into a wide pool in the middle of the backyard corrugating in the wind were all overwhelmingly beautiful and I smiled at it all and sat down in the soaking muddy grass and wept.