The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 35: August 5

Today I was seated at a dinner beside the sister-in-law of a friend. We talked about self-destructive New Age healers and whether or not old Hasidic men in Brooklyn speak to you only if they think you’re a Polish prostitute, and she showed me pictures of her dog before she showed me pictures of her baby. Then we discussed the bath salts epidemic in Maine. My husband and I first learned about the bath salts epidemic through a local newspaper we’d purchased for the purpose of starting a fire in our woodstove. My husband held up a front page with a photograph of a distraught woman and the headline, “Husband Hasn’t Been the Same Since He Started Doing Them.” “Guess what he’s been doing?” my husband asked. I guessed coffee liqueur. I guessed Sudoku. “Bath salts,” he said. Bath salts? We imagined a man lying in a tub filled with scented water, unable to get out. Within a week he’d have lost his job, and his wife would be despairing. She’d cry at the foot of the tub in which he floated, serenely pink, as the house was repossessed and the children taken by social services.

The article did nothing to correct this assumption of ours. (We eventually learned that bath salts are typically snorted, that the high is a cross between meth and acid, that they can inspire people to eat the faces off of other people.) For days we believed that poverty-stricken people in Maine would get into a warm bath one day and never get out. Did this seem so implausible? It didn’t to me. Bath salts are a dangerous temptation in our household. My husband and I take turns before dinner disappearing into a salted bath. There is never a compelling reason to get out, not for the first forty-five minutes at least, until the water starts to cool and you’re vaguely reminded that you like the life you’ve built with your spouse, at which point you consider the possibility that it might be worth leaving the tub in order to maintain it. But if your life sucks and you hate your spouse? Yes, I can see a bathtub being a perfect place never to leave.

So this woman and I talked about the local bath salts epidemic. I didn’t know anyone who did them, but I’d once given a ride to a woman who’d been on them, I told her. She wanted to know the story of this woman. It was late at night, I said. My husband and I were returning from a dinner party and realized we were out of gas. We stopped at the automated pumps where there is always classic rock playing, where the lighting is always blue and bright, where it is always like an underage nightclub. On this night the pumps were playing Fleetwood Mac. I noticed another car parked just outside the illuminated area. One back door was open. The car appeared to have been abandoned, until, when I looked up again, I saw a lone woman zombie-shuffling toward the pump island.

“Help me,” she said. She spoke from beyond the grave. “Help me.”

I asked: How could we help her?

“Help me,” she said.

My husband and I exchanged a confused look.

“Can we call anyone to help you?” he said.

This time she heard us. She freaked out. Her face spasmed.

“My dad will kill me if he finds out,” she said. “He will fucking kill me.”

(I told the woman with whom I was having dinner: “Mind you, this woman was easily forty years old.”)

We asked the woman where she lived, she answered vaguely, we calculated based on these vague descriptions that her house wasn’t too far out of our way. We offered her a ride, even though my husband worried, given the woman’s tenuous grip on her surroundings, that she’d never be able to locate her own driveway, and that we’d be carting her around all night.

I drove. My husband sat in the back because he hates making small talk with strangers on street drugs with whom he is, by the laws of vehicular proximity, obliged to chat. We also figured he could restrain her from behind if she went nuts. We’d already shared a knowing glance—bath salts, clearly. Given we had no experience with the bath salt high, we thought we should be prepared for anything.

Once we were driving, her brain notched into a manic groove. “You have no idea what happened to me tonight. You have no idea. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.” This refrain persisted for seven miles. She’d grabbed my husband’s hand over the back of her seat; she violently caressed it. “Shit Louie,” she said. “That’s what people say down south. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. Shit Louie. You have no idea what happened to me tonight.”

At this point I wanted an idea. The reason I’d agreed to give this woman a ride was, yes, because she was in a bind, but the repayment for my generosity should be her story. What happened tonight? I half suspected there’d been a dead body in her car. She’d killed her boyfriend, maybe, for refusing to drive her home.

As we neared the town where she lived, her energy changed. She grew distracted. Her scatty brain got ideas it couldn’t articulate. She held her purse in her lap; she slid one hand inside of it. I sensed an impulsive act brewing. For the first time, I got scared. She was going to pull a gun — the gun with which she’d killed her boyfriend — and now she was going to kill me, or my husband, or herself. No target would prove compelling until, in a random millisecond, it became unbearably compelling. She started repeating, menacingly, “I owe you big-time. I owe you big-time. Shit Louie, I am going to give you the best present ever.”

The ride ended uneventfully. She located her driveway. She lived in a trailer, a nice one. She hopped out of the car and suddenly seemed as harmless as a drunk teenager relieved to be home. “I am going to give you the best present tomorrow!” she said again, forgetting she had no idea who we were or where we lived.

I concluded by saying to my dinner partner, “And for sure the woman was on bath salts!” I felt a little bit guilty having wasted so much time telling her this story. It starts promisingly, but the end tells nothing. “Very interesting true story but the ending is a letdown.” I hadn’t turned the deflation of events into a moment of unexpected revelation. I could see the woman trying to apply the right kind of curiosity, because I hadn’t properly directed it. Her curiosity passed over the bath salts woman and landed on me.

“I can’t believe you gave her a ride,” she said. “That says a lot about you as a person.” I thought she was going to compliment me on my selflessness, and I would then counter with the usual demurrals. She was so desperate! Anyone would have done what I did!

“Either you’re stupid,” she said, “or you’re just really nosy.”