James Sallis - Moth

In the car on the way Mrs. Adams asked me to tell her about Verne’s last years, offering no comment when I was through. We passed the remainder of the trip, just over an hour, in silence, watching the storm build: a certain heaviness at the horizon, rumbles of thunder in unseen bellies of clouds, lightning crouched and stuttering behind the dark pane.

Mrs. Adams had me drop her off on the highway outside town, at a cinderblock church ( Zion Redemption Baptist ) where, she said, her sister lived, adding “pastor’s wife,” her toneless voice (it seemed to me) implying equally scorn and acknowledgment of status. She would go on to the hospital first thing in the morning.

Closer in, I stopped at one of those gargantuan installations that look like battleships and seem to carry everything from gas and drinks and snacks to novelty T-shirts, athletic shoes and the occasional Thanksgiving turkey. You could probably pick up a TV or computer system at some of these places. I pushed a dollar over the counter toward a teenage girl wearing a truly impressive quantity of denim-shirt, pants, boots, jacket, even earrings-and poured my own coffee from a carafe squatting on the hot plate ( One Refill Only, Please ) beside display cards of Slim Jims, snuff and lip balm. Then I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and sat there breathing in the coffee’s dark, earthy smell, feeling its heat and steam on my face, sipping at it from time to time. New Orleans coffee makes most others seem generic, but I was at this moment far, far from home, a wanderer, and could make do. Besides, for the true believer coffee’s a lot like what Woody Allen says about sex: the worst he ever had was wonderful.

Back at the hospital years ago, later at AA meetings, coffee would disappear by the gallon, as though it were getting poured down floor drains. These people were serious coffee drinkers. Someone or another was pretty much always at work making a new pot, draining the urn to re-up it, dumping out filters the size of automobile carburetors or measuring out dark-roast-with-chicory by the half pound. Antlike streams of porters to back doors, fifty-pound sacks saddling their shoulders. They should have just pulled up tanker trucks outside, run a hose in.

So the mind, weary from the day’s travel, released for a time even from purposeful activity, wanders.

To a dayroom where a youngish man sits staring fixedly at reruns of Hazel, Maverick, I Dream of Jeannie, Jeopardy, swathed in the dead, false calm of drugs, mind all the while sparking and phosphorescing like the screen’s own invisible dots.

To a still younger man waking against a heap of garbage bins, loose trash, half a burned-out mattress, on a New Orleans street, shotgun houses hardly wider than their entry doors in dominolike rows as far as he can see looking up from the pavement there, wondering how last night bled over into this bleary, pain-filled morning, how he shipwrecked here, wherever here is, finding what little money he had left, of course, gone.

To a teenage boy then, spine bent in a question mark above Baldwin or Notes from the Underground as flies buzz the screen and morning nibbles dark away from the window, a boy just beginning to sense with fear and elation how very large the world is and to believe that, turning these pages, naming things in these mirrors, he’ll discover secret doors and passageways few other of the castle’s inhabitants suspect.

Forward suddenly to a man in his forties as he sits over a drink and the final pages, proofing them, of a novel titled The Old Man, wondering if he’ll ever be able to do what he has just, amazingly, done, to create so vivid and reflective a world, ever again.

Two young black men pulled in by one of the pumps. They were driving a Ford that looked as though it had been badly burned then skin-grafted with pot metal; a plywood wall of speakers replaced the backseat. Even at that remove the heavy bass, all I could really make out, tugged hard at my viscera. I swallowed the last mouthful of cold coffee, started the engine, and pulled back out onto the highway. A mile or so further along, a sign reading Clarksville pointed off to the right. I turned onto a two-way highway surprisingly populous with late-model cars, pickups, and several awkward, unwieldy pieces of farm machinery, like dinosaurs strayed from their own slow time, confused and lost in the furious rush of modern life.

The hospital sat on what passed for a hill in this part of Mississippi, on the far side of a city whose business district comprised maybe ten square blocks, a preponderance of its commercial space appearing to be given over to wholesale food concerns, beauty supplies and autoparts shops. Clarksville Regional Hospital. An automatic ticket dispenser stood sentry at the parking lot, but the gate was up. I drove in, parked and started for the building just as the rain let go.

Even inside, in the lobby, I could hear it slamming down. Windows ran with water, closing off the outer world, and when lights blinked briefly off and back on I had the momentary, terrifying sensation of being enclosed in an aquarium. I reached out and touched the wall to steady myself.

“You all right, sir?”

A young man stepped through one of the doors, two older women close behind. They were all black, all in whites and carrying coats.

“If you’re looking for the emergency room, it’s down this hallway to your right. I can call help if you’d like. Or I’ll walk you down myself, since it doesn’t look like I’ll be going anywhere soon.”

I told him I was fine, just tired, that I’d been driving all day from New Orleans. Other personnel began gathering out of various hallways and doors, looking out at the downpour with irritation and anger. But even as they watched, the rain abated, settled into a soothing, slow rhythm. Most sprinted toward cars, coats or newspapers held over their heads. I asked the young man to direct me to the newborn intensive-care unit.

Then, following his instructions, I took a nearby elevator to the second floor to meet Baby Girl McTell.

For a long time, meaning that I rarely woke without memory of the previous night’s events, and never in hospitals or jails anymore, I’d had my drinking under control.

I knew it wasn’t that simple, of course. What is?

One of the distinctions of this addiction, because only true alcoholics have them, are blackouts. We go on moving through the physical world, driving cars, carrying on conversations and cooking meals, with whole banks of relays and higher functions closed down, unwitting passengers in our own bodies.

I was by this time a veritable quagmire of information on addiction. I could draw you diagrams, cite percentages, talk to you about noradrenaline and dopamine and receptor sites. I knew the alcoholic’s body for some reason doesn’t metabolize intoxicants the same way other people’s do. That the addiction lodges itself where reality curves gently away from appearance, and thrives there, pushing them ever further apart. That all his life, whatever he does, a physical, psychological, ontological dialogue will be going on inside the alcoholic, and that as long as he continues to drink, however controlled it appears, sooner or later, a day, ten years, or twenty, he’ll wake up once again with the world quivering terribly behind the thinnest of membranes, thoughts bending slowly, unstoppably away from one another in the terrible gravity of alcohol’s black sun.

The membrane was there for me when I woke the next afternoon. As though I were almost, but not quite, within the world; almost, but not quite, real. And as though the slightest misstep, the slightest tear at the membrane, might bring the waters of some endless night crashing down upon me from the other side.