Today the morning sunlight was flashing through our bedroom windows and in it I saw my mother. She was sitting on the front step of our house in Capitol Hill peeling apples and watching Claire and me. We were children dancing in the sprinkler. A Rain Bird. I don’t know how the name returns, or where it’s stored, but there it is. A Rain Bird attached to the hose and there’s my mother when she was young, and us two in that summer afternoon light.
Do you remember that summer, Mom? The feeling of that cool concrete step against your legs. Watching us through the spray. Did you know, even then, all that time ago, what you were capable of, what was kept within you?
See how that awful black weight creeping through my lungs can provoke such a joyous film, such gentle images. See how that projector finally pulled me from bed.
Its light was cutting my eyes, and crisscrossing through my skull, and the noise and strobing was no longer endurable and I had to escape it.
So I found a way out of bed and into the shower and into my clothes and out onto the road. I recall none of that. Not my feet on the ground, not the water, neither my belt nor these shirt buttons in my fingers.
First there was the film, and then I was walking along the road again with my hair wet, and the pine wind cooling my burning brain. It was a nice, calm middle ground. Not like the night before, not like the morning. I came to the diner and bought a paper and a glazed donut and sat outside. I was hoping I might find the black-haired woman there, early for breakfast before the market. But no luck.
There was an article in the paper about Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who killed himself a few days before. It was John Le Carré who wrote it and he said the world had been “too bright for him to handle.” That Hoffman had to either “screw up his eyes or be dazzled to death.”
I tore that paragraph out and brought it home in my pocket. Maybe you either squint or you die. But really I don’t think he was dazzled to death. I think he died squinting. In my experience, that’s what heroin and all the rest is for. It replaces the broken filters. It prevents the trees and the sky from carving into you.
Tess and I smoked it twice and shot it once that first year in Seattle. No shortage of heroin in Belltown then. At the beginning of our American Dream, all I had to do was lean out the window. I won’t go on about it except to say that its softness, the protection it provided me from my own mind, was terrifying in its warm pleasure. If not for Tess, I’m not sure I’d have ever stopped.
So I will tell you that I understand. I will tell you just how easy it would be. How reasonable. It makes such sense to me. And I don’t think there’s any shame in it, either.
Not the drugs, and not the suicide.
If you have a broken system, maybe it’s either squint or die.