“But now look where I am,” he continues. “I’ve come full circle, because I see the people that I prosecute as case files, black ink on a white page. There’s so fucking many meth-heads, I can’t differentiate. I don’t get a chance to see them in their homes. I don’t really have time to see them even as people, because that’s not how I’m trained. So how have I evolved?” he asks, rubbing quickly at his nose before answering his own question. “I haven’t. I devolved.”
Brigitte comes over to take Nathan’s order. Her hair is dyed black to hide the gray, and she wears dark glasses that turn darker in the sun when she goes outside. When she leaves, Nathan leans forward onto the table and clasps his hands.
“Let’s try to look at meth scientifically and economically,” he begins. “First, there’s the part of your brain that’s evolved over thousands of years to reward you for doing the things that will regenerate the species. Have sex, feel good, in a nutshell. Then there’s meth, which is twenty times better than sex. So, basically, meth becomes more powerful than biology.
“So you can put a tweaker in prison, and the whole time he’s in there, he’s thinking of only one thing: how he’s going to get high the day he’s out. He’s not even thinking about it, actually. He’s like, rewired to know that everything in life is about the drug. So you say, ‘What good does prison do?’
“Meanwhile, whether he’s in prison or out on the street tweaking, he’s disengaged from the economy. There’s a whole sector of the blue-collar workforce that’s just gone around here. So what we have as an alternative is these state-mandated halfway-house things, where for two months you have to check in and check out each day; you have to hold a job; you have to take piss tests. Fine. But two months,” says Nathan, “isn’t shit. Two months clean on meth is nothing. Why not make it five years? Put money into building and staffing those places and try and keep people straight for years at a time while giving them something to lose—a job, a sense of security.”
Nathan leans back. The pork tenderloin is here. Brigitte says warmly, “Enjoy, honey.” Nathan has known both her and her children all his life.
“Thanks,” Nathan says. As she walks away, Nathan looks at her. He says, “The problem is, no one who works an honest job wants to give the tweakers any more chances to fuck up.”
He sits back and looks at his sandwich. Suddenly he’s not hungry.
“Dealing with meth logically is a difficult sell to the people of this town. I understand why. It’s hard, knowing that the same dirt-bag is going to be in court tomorrow for the third time this year. I mean, I’m sorry, but I leave work and go to the farm to work more. And sometimes I look at the guy who can’t stop doing crank, and I just think, ‘Fuck. It’d be easier to shoot the son of a bitch.’”
The thought makes him laugh. He laughs so hard that people turn to look. At the table next to us, an old farmer in blue jeans, his green John Deere windbreaker hung over the back of his chair, stares angrily at Nathan. Nathan coldly returns the favor. For a long moment, one of them might do something, if only he knew what.
CHAPTER 2
THE MOST AMERICAN DRUG
On a cold winter night in 2001, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police had hung live human heads in the trees of the yard. Jarvis knew the police did this when they meant to spy on people suspected of being meth cooks. The heads were informants, placed like demonic ornaments to look in the windows and through the walls. As Jarvis studied them, they mumbled and squinted hard to see what was inside the house. Then the heads, satisfied that Jarvis was in fact cooking meth in the basement, conveyed the message to a black helicopter hovering over the house. The whoosh of the blades was hushed and all but inaudible, so Jarvis didn’t notice the helicopter till he saw the heads tilt back on their limbs and stare at the cold night sky. By then, Jarvis knew he had to hurry: Once the helicopter sent coordinates to the Cop Shop, it would be only moments before they raided the house.
Jarvis ran downstairs to the basement. He was wearing a Minnesota Vikings tank top, a pair of boxer shorts, and white tube socks. A divorced thirty-five-year-old father of four who’d been making meth since the mid-1990s and using the drug since he was sixteen, Jarvis had been in jail all but three of the last ten years. He did not want to go back. So bottle by bottle and container by container, he poured down the flood drain in the floor of his mother’s basement the chemicals he had stored there: anhydrous ammonia, Coleman lantern fluid, denatured alcohol, and kerosene. Finally he poured two gallons of hydrochloric acid down the drain. Then he lit a cigarette.
People around town like to say that Roland Jarvis blew himself up. The sound Jarvis heard immediately following the click of his lighter, though, was not anything like an explosion. It was a very distinct and very quiet sucking sound. It took about a quarter of a second for the ionized hydrogen in the hydrochloric acid to propagate from the lighter’s flame and into the drain. This made the entire basement into a vacuum. Jarvis heard a soft Whoomp! Then came the blast, the force of which blew out the windows and singed Jarvis’s body wherever it wasn’t covered by clothing. In the space of several more tenths of a second, all his exposed body hair burned off. When he looked down, he saw that his tube socks were somehow no longer on his feet. When he looked up, he saw that the wooden ceiling was consumed by animate, expanding rivulets of blue flame. His mother, who was something of a packrat, had stored her deceased husband’s books, clothes, and fishing equipment in boxes in the basement, alongside old furniture she couldn’t bear to sell, for it had been in her family since the days before her grandmother left Sicily. Now all of it was on fire. Oxygen poured into the basement through the blown-out windows, feeding the flames. Jarvis’s tank top was burning, so he took it off and went running up the stairs and out onto the porch. He stood there a while, thinking. Then he decided to go back into the house.
For forty-five minutes, Jarvis made one trip after another into his mother’s home, even as the fire spread from room to room and floor to floor. He filled a plastic mop bucket over and over, and fought the fire relentlessly, stopping every now and again to bring a couch or a table outside into the brutal Iowa night. At one point, dissatisfied with the water output of the kitchen sink, Jarvis claims that he harnessed the superhuman strength afforded him by the dual effects of his meth high and his panicked adrenaline rush to pull the sink from its housing in the counter and throw it against a wall in a blind rage.
Jarvis says he wanted to save the house. It’s considered a foregone conclusion by the police that he was trying to retrieve the remnants of his meth lab, along with the formidable amount of dope that he had been making, for Jarvis, in a town full of meth cooks, was considered one of the finest and most prolific of their number. That, or he was attempting to spread the fire himself in order to burn as much evidence as possible. It’s conceivable, too, that he was in such a state of psychotic disarray, emotional bankruptcy, and physical disembodiment that he was doing all three of those things. What stopped him, in any event, is that he began to melt.
Following one of his trips outside, Jarvis looked down and saw what he thought was egg white on his bare arms. It was not egg white; it was the viscous state of his skin now that the water had boiled out of it. Jarvis flung it off himself, and then he saw that where the egg white had been he could now see roasting muscle. He looked at his legs and his abdomen. His skin was dripping off his body in sheets. Panicked, standing there in the frigid night outside the inferno of his mother’s home, naked but for his boxer shorts, which he’d inadvertently soaked in water while fighting the fire, Roland Jarvis began pushing sheets of skin from himself, using his hands like blunt tools, wiping and shoving the hide from as much of his body as he could reach. He’d have pulled the melting skeins of skin from himself in bigger, more efficient sections, but for the fact that his fingers had burned off of his hands. His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.