24

Wild knew there were bombers flying somewhere over hairy, jungled continents and releasing their payloads into the sky. Could hear their low drone. Animals with fangs made of bamboo and steel, their snouts smeared with matter and blood. Machines that crunched chicken carcasses to pulp. Cancer with teeth and hair in an elderly man’s lower back, crouching like a snickering homunculus.

The world was full of terrible things. It was armed, it curled and massed against him, like an enormous wave preparing to break. He could feel these things upon his skin, smell them through his teeth, almost taste them directly through his hands and feet. Indeed, he felt as though his skin were attempting to shuck itself free of him altogether. To be rid of this impossible body. He couldn’t blame it. It’s a terrible thing to be in horror of one’s very self, to be aware of one’s own stench.

How did that Psalm go? I am a worm, and no man. A reproach of men, and despised by the people. Something like that.

He scratched at himself, from arm to toe to thigh to ribs, seeking spot fires of discomfort and irritation that swarmed across his goosebumped skin. His bones were of ice, his eyeballs lumps of salt, his teeth like gravestones sunk into his gums. An itch in the back of his throat, the exact place impossible to locate: he would need to drill through at a point somewhere beneath his right ear to reach it. And then another, deep in the knuckles of his right hand. His nose and eyes streamed. Some dull explosion was taking place within but it would take a lifetime—incremental, interminable, an eternity—to be finished with him.

He lay on the bed, then sat on its edge and bounced lightly to hear the springs squawk. There was no position for his screaming body. His poor body, leaden with ache and keen as a blade. A sponge thickening with sorrow. I could live to be two hundred and never again feel like this, he thought. A thousand long, dry years. And he cried out at the thought of living so long.

Wild had tried to detox many times before, years ago, even before that terrible night at Louise and Frank’s. When Jane had first found out he was using morphine, there had been the expected disbelief and anger. They discussed the matter around the kitchen table late into the night. This was when Alice was little, probably no more than six or seven years old, when she could be shielded from such things, when their marital sorrow could still be contained.

Jane had made whispered phone calls and driven him to a detox unit that smelled of disinfectant and loss in an outer suburb. It was like lifting a rock, an entire layer of the world of which he’d been hitherto unaware. Forms to fill out and blood tests and beds with rubber sheets, a place where everyone spoke from the side of their mouth and jiggled their feet. They asked him about his drug history and whether he’d shared syringes and how much he was using.

I use drugs to cope with the pain of using drugs, he’d volunteered later that night to a social worker opposite him in the waiting room, certain the wit of this would stand out among the dreary litany of abused childhoods and secret traumas. Actually, he went on, I blame Chet Baker. The worker said nothing, barely registered interest, but Wild had continued nonetheless. After all, he’d thought at the time, isn’t that what we’re here for? Some sort of therapeutic unravelling?

When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I stumbled upon a garage sale a few streets away from where I lived. There was the usual junk: old lamps, a blender, some clothes on a rack. But there was also a bunch of records in a box and they were different from anything I’d seen. They were these old jazz records. Some old buff must have died or something, I don’t know, but there was a collection of Chet Baker and Billie and Miles Davis, you know, all the really good stuff from that era. The fifties, I guess. The real deal. Anyway. I bought a couple of these records, I don’t know why. I think I just knew that they were something special, like they’d been put there for me, had been waiting for me to come along. And you know what? I was right.

From the first moment, I knew this was something. Those cracked voices and frail smiles. Chet Baker doing My Funny Valentine, you know that song? Unbelievable. Like he’s so busted up he can barely bring himself to sing it, just sort of sighs through it, but beautifully. Only two minutes long. A love song, but what sort of love? I didn’t know much about art or music or what was good or anything, but this was something. And the whole junk thing, you know? Billie being busted in a hospital room with hundreds of dollars stuffed into her stockings, Chet Baker jumping out a window in Amsterdam. All that romance of despair or something. In love with my own destruction. Not that I was ever a musician or anything, and actually didn’t really start using drugs for a long time afterwards. I did my degree and carried on and got married and all that, so . . . maybe I’m wrong, but I still blame Chet. Course I don’t have any of those records anymore. Lost or sold or broken.

And still the woman in the waiting room didn’t say anything, just sat there and nodded absently. It was only when she wiped the back of her hand across her nose that Wild realised that she wasn’t a social worker at all but just another damn junkie trying to get clean.

But he’d sat in the detox for an entire day and half the night watching television with other sweating creatures until he conspired with two other men to escape and score. He would supply the money if they could find some dope at this absurd hour. Win-win. At 3.00 a.m. they drove through bruise-dark streets in a rattling car until they finished up in some small, inner-city flat with a crowd of people huddled over bent and blackened spoons. Everyone was tattooed and smoked furiously, as if affronted by each and every cigarette. The men compared east-coast prisons. A fight broke out at one point and a toddler with a trail of shit down its leg wandered through the smoke haze eating potato chips.

They had watched television, the early-morning evangelical timeslot through to ancient American reruns and children’s hour. Smiling people in bright jumpsuits, and stars made from red paper. On the way home, he had picked flowers from the local park for Jane, but she hadn’t been at all pleased to see him stagger into the house a day after his shiny new beginning, and stared at him before turning away to drink her tea.

Now Wild thought of his wife. Poor Jane, for so long always on the verge of tears.

I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint.