White Out by Michael W Clune

Author:Michael W Clune
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-61649-493-3
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Published: 2013-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

But that was an anomaly. I started telling people Nancy had raped me. I said it as a joke at first, for the shocked laughs. Then I kind of believed it. She wasn’t too pleased when it got back to her.

But that was just a misunderstanding. Not important. I really don’t know why I even put it in here. At the time, I hardly even noticed it, with all the new things I was learning. The little things, for example. I never knew about the cancer of the little things. Checking my mail, doing laundry, opening a car door, closing the door. I never realized how sick it was making me. Picking up the phone. Buying milk. I was a sitting duck. Walking across a floor or down a path. Driving somewhere. Waking up. It was killing me. It’s killing all of us. Some diseases you never know you have until you get the cure.

I got the cure. It came in white-topped vials. Sometimes they had red tops. The cancer of putting gas in my car in fair weather or foul without being high was history. The cancer of sober morning, the cancer of sober evening: history. The cancer of being vulnerable to constantly changing feelings. Exposed naked on the cliffs of your natural brain chemistry. Alternately scorched or frozen. Some days you’re happy; some days you’re sad. Fuck that.

Human life is like a Greek curse. Pushing a rock up a hill. Everything good is changing into something bad. And what’s almost worst, everything bad is changing too. Smiling or crying for no reason. On purpose or by accident.

When you’re human all things conspire against you. The terrible feeling of a sheet brushing against your naked skin when you’ve got a cold. No price is too high for escape. Stalin’s agents had cyanide capsules hidden in false teeth. I was the agent of the white revolution, and I had white tops hidden in my glove compartment, my desk drawers, my shoes, my allergy medicine bottles.

Perfect safety. Perfect freedom. Perfect comfort. Straight months of the invulnerable high. It closes all those doors, the doors that let in what you hate and let out what you love. The accordion doors of the lungs, the traitor heart mixing pain and time-poison with your blood. The hand door, the eye door.

Dope gives me a new, dope body. Closed like a fist. Of course I’m a little constipated, but that’s a small price to pay for total protection. No way for the time-poison, the change-poison to get in. I’m like a ball of metal. A thick spike of oxygen melts slowly in my center, where the lungs were. A white heart. I don’t know what the white heart does. It gets me high. I imagine it looks like a lump of dope. Like two big sugar cubes in a glass of milk.

And the way the world looks from deep inside the dope body! From high atop the white tower. The world. It would break your human heart to see it.

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