Jason sat down again. He was grinding the cocaine with a razor blade. He was filling the needle. I watched his hands, then his face. His eyes were wide and clear, a light hazel. His eyes looked lit from the inside as if he had swallowed candles. His eyes widened. He sucked in his breath. “Yeah,” he said, walking to the sink. “Oh, yeah,” he said, walking slowly, carefully, as if the floor might open up and swallow him, as if there were secret crevices, sudden unexpected gaps.
Then he filled my needle. His finger was tap, tap, tapping the sides of the syringe. I tied up my arm, using my teeth to tighten the belt as Jason, had. Blood came into the needle. I let the belt fall without being told.
“Don’t forget,” Jason said. “You’re a junkie from the first time you stick a needle in. It’s just a question of how long you stay clean.”
Jason was talking somewhere in the distance. Perhaps he was talking underwater. Night had fallen. The curtains were pulled. The studio was sealed from the world. There was no world anymore, just wind rippling and surging through the hollow spaces that were no longer lungs and rib cage but fields now, low hills with grasses swaying lightly in a sea breeze.
Jason’s words meant nothing to me then. They would mean something later. Later I would come to Jason’s studio at night. Later I would beg, “Do me, please.”
It was always night. The sun burned my eyes. I kept my shades drawn. It was now a permanent shadowy twilight. It was not day or night but a glistening gray where soft things rustled and glowed and floated like birds and perched undulating to the walls.
I inhabited a silky underbelly. A pastel layer that enveloped me. I had been swallowed by fast-moving clouds. I was floating in a cloud’s belly. Whenever I wanted skies to part, the clouds to gather momentum and rush blind over hills, over barely glimpsed cliffs burdened with lavender ice plant, I took another shot.
There was only the grinding, the tying, the filling, the cleaning, the feeling of tumbling exquisite. My mouth was wide and blue. When I yawned, clouds stirred and birds fluttered from my lips, a migration of orange and purple butterflies.
There was no reason to eat or sleep anymore. Cocaine was better than eating, better than sleeping. Cocaine was living curled in a cloud’s diaphanous white side. Cocaine was wearing the sky for eyes.
I needed Jason. I had bruised my arm badly. I had used the same disposable needle at least two hundred times. The point was dull. I was clumsy, awkward and afraid. Later the glistening veil sailed down and draped itself around me like a tent. My hands trembled. I plunged the needle in and missed, no blood. I began again, tying off my arm, pulling it tight with my teeth and plunging in. No blood. It wouldn’t register. Something was wrong. All night I stuck the needle in my arm and couldn’t find a vein. It was only as the sun rose, as the sun spread itself fat and yellow through my rooms, that I realized I had been sitting in darkness, had forgotten to turn on the lights and had tried to find my tiny purple veins in the blue-black center of night.
“Do me, please,” I begged Jason later.
He could find a vein through the four days of bruises on my arms. My veins were entirely hidden by green and purple and blue and black bruises flowering exotic across my skin. My arm seemed encased in a dark patterned snakeskin.
I looked at my arm dispassionately. It didn’t really belong to me. It was oddly tattooed. It reminded me of the purple and yellow pansy Francine had pressed into my childhood book of fairy tales. It had been summer. Francine and I were sitting under an oak tree. She picked the flower and serious, concentrating, carefully pressed the purple and yellow pansy into the golden book. I still have it.
I was sitting on the floor of Jason’s bathroom. He was shaving. His arms were a series of tiny red pinpricks. “You’ve got to slow down,” he said to me through the mirror.
I felt disadvantaged and small. I wanted to feel like the inside of a cloud. I wanted my eyelids to be butterflies printed red, purple and yellow, and fluttering now warm and soft. I wanted to get off. I wanted Jason to shoot me up. I wanted to feel the world spin white, white of canvas, white of clouds, white of enamel and starched linen, white of lace doilies, roses, ice cliffs and sails.
“Let’s see the arm,” Jason said.
I held out my arm. Jason looked at it through the mirror. He shook his head. “You’re butchering yourself,” he observed. I felt his words hitting the glass mirror and bouncing back at me like a thin sliver of silver, a kind of beam.
I wanted the dream. I wanted to snuggle in shimmering drifting flecks of white, bone chips and shells and the spilled guts of storm-spent whirling white clouds. I was trying again. I didn’t feel the pain as the needle went in. I was half drifting, startled when the needle finally registered, startled and dazed to see blood in the needle. I jerked back and the plunger moved too fast, bruising my arm. I forgot to let the tie drop. My arm swelled in an angry purple pocket. My arm ached. I thought I was dying. My arm was leaden, gray and cold. I felt that my arm was already dead.
“Help me, please.” Was that what Jason wanted to hear? Would I have to beg formally? Would there be a ritual?
“You’re done,” Jason said. “That arm’s shot. You’ll have to use your right arm. Shoot with your left.”
“I can’t,” I said. My hands were trembling. I have never been able to do anything with my left hand, not even write my name.
“You’ll have to.” Jason was patting his face dry. He looked at me. “You know, the wives of warriors were accomplished fighters in their own right. Are you a warrior, little girl?”
I leaned against the cool tiles of the bathroom wall. I knew why junkies died in bathrooms. It wasn’t a secret inexplicable affinity for shit. No, it was much simpler. Bathrooms had doors that locked. Bathrooms had good light, a sink and floors easy to mop the blood from. I began to cry.
In one motion, Jason whirled around. He slapped me across the face. “Don’t start that bullshit, junkie. You want it bad enough, you’ll do it.” He walked out of the room.
I looked at my left hand. It was shaking. Slowly I brought my hand up to my mouth and bit it. After a while my hand stopped shaking. I held the syringe with my left hand. I found a vein in my right arm. I let the tie drop. I cleaned my needle and leaned back against the cool white bathroom tiles. My back grew into the tiles. My back was cool and white. I merged into the wall, glistening. I was marble. I was porcelain. I was lilies of the valley. I was the lily. And the valley.
Jason was near me. He was white, a granite hillside by moonlight. He was sharp rock, naked. He was the spine of the world, a stone mountain. He was the beginning, the bleached sand, the fundamental, before divisions, before chance and error, when it/I was whole. I was a white egg. Jason cracked me. He had cloud chips for teeth. His hands were white metal.
Jason was grinding cocaine. He was tying off his arm. He was cleaning his needle. He was running the shower. He reached for me, for the tattooed arm that wasn’t mine, for the arm with the black flowers printed on like skintight bracelets. The arm moved toward him. The water was coursing down hot, a liquid silver exploding on my skin, oily balls rolling and spiraling. Jason’s tongue was red like an apple.
The water was a mist, a fine white frost. The water was like smoke in winter, the smoke you smell on country roads, logs burning, country logs smelling of pines and clouds. The water was hot, steaming. The water was primeval, jeweled. It fell, a string of delicately carved ivory beads.
“Tell me you need me,” Jason breathed behind me. He was pushing me against the blue tiled shower walls. “Tell me,” he said, pressing into me. He was white, hard, stone, metal. He was the beginning, fundamental. I was still, dark, huddled and open. I was the earth. He drilled and tunneled.