Lithium for Medea

8

Everything requires an explanation. Name. Age. Sex. Today I named myself Rose.

I am twenty-seven and a pine tree my age knows more. A pine has stood without complaints or vision, accepting the burden of sunlight and the torture of night rain. A pine tree squares its spiked green shoulders and becomes a model for saplings and a guardian of hillsides, content with the cycles, flush of spring, stripping winter, and all the predictable repetition.

The sex is obvious. I am female, as you can plainly see, under the dress, across the flesh. I can meet you in the parking lot. A country setting could be arranged.

Weight. Height. Current addictions. Who’s dying? How many did you say? Just arrests or convictions? You’re joking.

Marital status.

Marital status.

Jason was sitting in the kitchen alcove at a table that had once been mine. My father found it in a junk store and spent an entire month digging through the layers of old paint and sanding it, bringing back the fine oak grain. Jason said he liked the table. And impulsively, I had given it to him. Now it is the only place in his studio where I feel comfortable.

Jason was grinding up cocaine. He looked at me and smiled. After all this time, when Jason smiles at me I feel caught, captured, held circling frantic like a moth at a light bulb in summer.

“You said you have a problem?”

I thought of my father battling for his life. Jason was staring at me. And I knew there could be no connection between my parallel worlds. All was ordered and mutually exclusive. The pathways were clearly etched, straight and smooth as asphalt highways, deliberate as a surgeon’s incision. The roads would never intersect, no matter the gravity, no matter the pull to the dark center, the cruel underbelly where I lived and watched worlds churn while stars clawed my face, floors dissolved and nothing was solid.

“It’s O.K. now,” I said, pulling my blouse over my head.

Jason nodded. “You always panic. See, nothing’s that bad, right?”

“Right,” I said.

Of course, it wasn’t me speaking. The me I had once been had disappeared. Someone else remained, some pale relative. Now all I wanted Jason to do was tie my arm up. All I wanted Jason to do was tap, tap, tap the sides of the syringe and find a vein to fuck. We were always close when we shot dope. We were kin then, sanctified by blood.

Picasso was sitting near Jason’s leg, a fine white and orange tabby cat with long thick fur. I hadn’t killed him yet, hadn’t come and taken him warm and trusting across the boulevard and down to the shoreline and strangled him.

“You get any rents?” Jason asked.

He was grinding up cocaine. My problem had been dismissed, inconsequential. Jason spilled a small white heap from a glass vial onto a mirror. Then he ground the particles into a powder with a razor blade. Jason was concentrating, looking down at the table, absorbed.

Six years before, Jason had said, “There’s an art to needles.”

We were in Jason’s house then, too. He was studying a new batch of needles. His movements were slow and precise, almost tender. I already realized that he kept his world small and manageable. Within the walls of his studio, he was absolute master. Within his rooms Jason controlled chaos. This was his oasis. Los Angeles was shut out, totally erased. Here it was always a late afternoon in an indeterminate but warm season. Jason had built a water fountain in his front room. Goldfish and turtles swam. I could hear them through the water in the darkness, just before I fell asleep.

Over the years I learned that Jason’s studio is a museum of his personal life. Here the eras of his existence are preserved for possible study and reflection. Jason has been using the painting props for more than a decade. For more than ten years one woman after another has posed with the green surfboard near her shoulder or thigh, sending shadows rubbing against her breast like a live thing, a vine perhaps. For a decade one woman after another has lain on the beach towels with her legs spread or softly curled while the surfboard casts shadows against her flesh, shadows now red, violet or something heavy, a rancid-looking dark green.

In the beginning, I wanted Jason to teach me about needles. I wanted him to teach me about the goldfish that swam in his living room and the flowers and vegetables he grew in his garden. I was empty then, washed clean and ready for Jason.

I would prove I wasn’t easy to erase the way all his other women had been, the interchangeable women who posed for him and whom he let stay briefly, until the painting was finished, until he found someone who excited him more, offered him more, if only a slightly different voice or flesh history.

Six years before, Jason had stripped the needles from their disposable plastic shells. “These, see”—he pointed—“they’re too big.” He picked up another needle. “Perfect.” He held the needle near my face. “You’ll know the size next time.”

I didn’t memorize the size. I wasn’t planning on a next time.

Then everything came to a halt. There were two of me. One of me was sickened with fear. The other, the outside one, sat calmly, as if taking notes. I watched Jason move through the late afternoon shadows.

We were sitting at a different table then. This was before my father spent one month stripping the table he would find years later, stripping it back to the original oak, slowly, with infinite care, bringing back the dark wood grain, the grain that was etched and smoothly polished as a sea stone wearing the embrace of waves.

Jason pulled the kitchen curtains closed. He walked through the house and returned with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a bag of cotton. He filled a glass of water and tested the plunger again. He sorted through the hall closet and came back with a pale blue bathrobe belt.

“You know the bad reputation needles have?” Jason asked me the first time. “Well, they deserve it. Are you sure you want to do this?”

I nodded again, certain. I had a sense of the enormity of what we were going to share. There would be a bond in this. There would be discovery and change. There would be blood. Something would be decided.

It was a new world. The old forms had failed. There could be no decisions made by judges in courts of law, no marriage or baby. We had to develop our own bonding rituals. Our laws were a return to something primitive, the law of shared blood.

“Needles are their own world,” Jason said. “You get into paraphernalia. It’s part of the trip. The grinding up. The spooning in. You’ll appreciate it later.”

I wasn’t planning on later. I was only doing this once, as a rite of passage, a special sealing ceremony, nothing more.

Jason was satisfied with the grinding. He drew two sample lines of cocaine on the mirror. With a knife he guided the powder from the mirror into a spoon. He dropped a small piece of cotton into the spoon. Slowly, concentrating, he measured 2 cc of water into the spoon. He put the syringe into the spoon, drawing the liquid, the cocaine and water, up through the cotton.

I extended my arm. It lay on the table in front of me like an alien object, a piece of driftwood, perhaps, curved smooth and white by the pressure of water.

“Me first,” Jason said.

I watched him pull the bathrobe belt around his arm. He used his teeth to tighten it. He flexed his hand open and closed, open and closed. “Watch me,” he said. His veins stood out like the blue ridges denoting rivers on a map. He rested the needle against his vein. He pushed the needle in.

Blood jumped up in the needle. The blood was very thick and very dark. “Blood shows you’ve registered. Hit the vein.” He was letting the belt fall loose and drop to the floor. “As soon as you register, drop the tie,” Jason said, pushing the plunger.

Jason took the needle out. He took a deep breath. His eyes went wide. He took another deep breath.

“You O.K.?” I asked. We would ask that of one another often across the years.

Jason nodded. Slowly, as if the floor wasn’t solid, he walked to the kitchen sink and ran water through the needle, then alcohol and water again. “Got to clean the needle. Remember. Always clean it.”

He sat down at the table. He dragged some white powder from the mirror to the spoon. He poured in water. He took the second needle. He tested the plunger.

“I’m only going to show you once,” he said, filling the syringe with liquid. He tapped the sides of the needle, tap, tap, tap, tap. “That’s the rule. I only shoot people once. From then on, they’re on their own. Tie up your arm.”

I picked up the terry-cloth belt from the floor. My fingers were not my own. They were useless slabs of flesh. They could be part of some other form of animal, something with flippers. Jason helped pull the belt tight around my arm.

“Pump,” Jason commanded. And I pumped my fist, now open, now closed.

“You’ve got no veins,” Jason observed. He held my arm and turned it toward the light, studying it from another angle. He looked disgusted. “These are the worst veins I’ve ever seen,” he pronounced. “You’re not in this game for long.”

Jason poured alcohol onto cotton. He swabbed my skin, just like in a doctor’s office. I watched his face. He was intent, concentrating. He might have been gluing the mast onto a toy model of a ship.

“O.K.,” Jason said. He was the man at the loudspeaker at Cape Canaveral. He was going to push the button and hurl the rocket into space. He was announcing all systems go, green and counting.

“Let go of the tie when I tell you.” Jason was holding the needle against my vein. I started to turn my head away.

“Watch,” Jason commanded.

There was a stab of pain. Blood came into the needle. I stared at my arm. The arm did not belong to me. It wasn’t really connected to my body. Jason was holding my arm, balancing it against his raised knee.

“Let go,” Jason said. I released the belt. It slid onto my lap.

There was a hot wind. Slowly, I realized the wind was within me. It was every wind I had ever known. It was the wind of childhood, the wind that brushed my six-year-old face when I skated the sidewalks of Philadelphia in autumn. It was the wind that came in the middle of the night in the east, in November, a wind rippling with the cool promise of the first snow. It was a wind tangled with greasy pronged summer oak leaves. It was a wind pitted with the charred bits of the oak leaves and maple leaves later, stained by sun in autumn, falling broken to the earth and lying there like severed red fists.

“This is your fit.” Jason put my needle on the table in front of me. He had put it back in its plastic shell. “Take care of it.”

I nodded. I knew I wouldn’t have to take care of it. I was going to do this thing now and only now. It would be over at dawn.

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.

“Tell me you missed me,” Jason breathed behind me, husky, a kind of wind, a May wind, a spring wind, stinging with promises of gardenias and marigolds, fat red buds poised on emerald vines, dew in the new shoots, the air steaming with jasmine, the streets sinking bewitched by rushing bluebirds.

“I missed you, yes,” my voice said. My voice was wind. My voice was a dark brown of just plowed earth. I was the smell of fresh brown bread steaming on a wooden shelf. My hair was wet. Jason pulled it like a rope, hard, jerking my head back. Why, I was a horse and he was riding me. I breathed through my mouth.

“Tell me how much you missed me,” Jason coaxed.

He held my waist. My forehead was pressed into the tile. My mouth was opened. I tried to speak but my mouth simply drank the night. I was a river swollen and squeezed through a cliff’s eye. The sky was empty. Jason parachuted down. I waited. The parachute opened magenta and red folds, billowing down like gigantic petals. He was lava. I was melting into thin strands of gold. He was breathing and pushing behind me. His breath was the wind in late May, a wind tinged with strawberries, cherries, all the pink tongues pushing up from hillsides. Jason was the storm, pressing and pumping electric.

We didn’t have bodies in the conventional sense anymore. There had been some evolutionary adaptation, a sudden accelerated mutation. We were part porpoise. We could live beneath the great churning sheets of sea water. Our flesh was too thin, too pale and soft. It wasn’t even the skin of fish. It lacked all substance. It cast no shadows. We had become dream creatures.

The dream was enormous. I had been someone else. And Jason had recreated me. I was his invention. He had painted me in the beginning. There had been an unexpected sharing and merging. I had been subtly altered. If painting began as a religious ritual, a part of the hunt, wasn’t it possible that the magic still stirred? Hadn’t Jason tapped into that other realm when he painted me onto canvas?

And the man with me was no longer the Jason he had once been. This man too was subtly altered. He was in part my creation.

The dream had a fragile domed shell. The dream was encased in a glistening hard enamel. But it could be punctured. It could be opened and closed like a fist, like my fist pumping open and closed, open and closed, waiting for the one small stab into blue vein, blue, blue as the sky, my mouth, the tides and Jason behind me, hard, invisible, the wind.

Now it was seven years later. It was the table my father had stripped and sanded down for me. Jason and I were sitting together. Jason was grinding cocaine with a razor blade. Picasso his cat sat near his leg.

“You know what I heard today?” Jason pressed the needle against his arm. “All over the country white toilet paper is the big seller. But not in L.A.” Jason stuck the needle in. Blood jumped. He let the tie drop. “Here, the more ornate the paper, the bigger it sells.” His eyes were wild. “Doesn’t it figure?”

I said nothing. I let Jason shoot me.

“You look sick,” Jason noted.

I walked to the bed, near the far wall. I could hear the goldfish swimming in the fountain. I could hear the sea breeze rustling the thin curtains, taking the curtains like a pale pair of wings. I curled into the shadows and waited for Jason and for the night to wrap its fine black claws around me.