Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

I can’t believe what he is saying; my throat burns and I feel like I’m going to cry. I stand up and start telling him about some experiments I’ve been performing and start moving my hands dramatically like he does as I talk, and I’m explaining about how I have always felt I was born in the wrong time in history and about if I just maybe had a chance to meet some peers or like he said some fellow scientists with similar interests, and now that he is here … Suddenly there is a bang on the wall. It’s Steve.

J. Robert comes with me. We are companions. Steve’s door is open and we find him nodding out on his bed with his legs splayed in front of his frail body, semi-conscious, his head drifting downward toward his feet. I shake him and he comes around.

Steve whines something about his high being ruined. J. Robert introduces himself and immediately offers Steve some crack, offending him deeply.

“I don’t smoke that shit, Bob, it don’t do nothing for me. And as far as I can tell the sorry people who really like it, I mean the people who really get it in their blood, are the ones who already hate themselves the most.”

His eyes are rolling back in his head, and he is speaking completely through his nose as if it were a kazoo. “That’s why I shoot dope, because I’m selfish, because I treasure myself. And I just don’t mind that self feeling like it’s floating in a warm sea of warm tongues every single minute for the rest of its life, that’s all. Is it so awful, Bob? My advice is you leave my crackerjack friend here out of your—”

J. Robert’s voice booms theatrically. “Sir, I must ask you to hold your tongue! Treasure yourself? How asinine! It’s philistines like you who cloud the great minds of our nations with your rhetoric of self-worship. This crack cocaine unleashes the truest and noblest potentials in our society! And furthermore …,” but he leaves it because Steve has nodded off again, and this time I don’t wake him up. I’m just glad he knows so little of science; if he doesn’t recognize J. Robert he can’t rat him out. Rat him out to whom I’m not sure.

Back in my room, J. Robert’s fuming anger is transforming into a sort of agitated sadness. I think it is probably also due to the fact that he is starting to come down, but I don’t tell him. He comments on the naked futility of existence, on the mercilessness of my light bulb, and then says something in what I think is Dutch. The rain has stopped. Luckily, he wants to smoke more rock, which is good because I do too.

“What made you want to smoke crack in the first place?” I say.

“Excellent question. Because, Hank, to have a sound and crystallized view on something, I feel one must experience it firsthand — to know what one is talking about, that is — and this crack just seems like an area I should form an opinion on.”

I notice sweat stains forming in the armpits of his crisp white Oxford shirt. I want desperately to pick up where we left off, before we were interrupted, eager for him to listen to some more of my theories.

“You know, J. Robert, these pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes.”

“Simple physics,” he says. “Ordinary glass would shatter if subjected to this type of treatment, just like us, huh, Hank? Steeled by the girders of inquiry and knowledge!” He shakes my shoulder and it stabs me with pain, but I don’t tell him to stop.

The scientific conversation doesn’t last. J. Robert has loosened his tie and is pacing and anxious; he wants to go outside, see the sights, meet the locals, get some air, and of course buy more crack. I fear J. Robert will forget about me if we leave, or that he will disappear and never come back. I tell him we have more than enough to last us the night, and that this neighbourhood is ugly and dangerous and unscientific and we should just stay here and just smoke and talk. He snatches his jacket, begins stuffing his pockets with vials. “Hank, my colleagues call me Oppie. And Oppie is not going to tell you what to do, but Oppie and his narcotics are going outside, into this night — this night whose force shall break, blow, burn, and make us new!”

Results

I was twenty-six when I first smoked crack. Crack. It sounds so ridiculous even when I say it now, so pornographic. I started late in relation to most. I’d just moved to Vancouver, like everybody else. I was at a party I’d overheard some people talking about that afternoon at a coffee shop. Right when I got there, a girl I didn’t know asked me if she could borrow some money. I asked her what for but she wouldn’t say. I told her whatever it was I would like to be in on it. I was drunk. I didn’t think I would have sex with her but I guess I hoped.

After the first glorious toke, I calmly asked how much of it was hers and how much of it was mine, took my share, and left. I fumbled through the dim rooms of the party and out the door, deciding to smoke rock forever.

It’s still forever and we are wandering the streets at the mercy of Oppie’s arbitrary fancies. He is oblivious to traffic or fatigue and often breaks spontaneously into a run. I give chase and am barely successful in my effort to stay with him. When I do catch up, he puts his arm on my shoulder, breathing heavily. He seems surprised to see me and tells me he’s glad I’m here.

The pavement is wet and reptilian, the air thick with evaporation. People are out tonight, like every night, hustling, smoking, chatting, shaking hands, screaming. Everybody is buying, selling, or collecting things of certain or possible value. Oppie is smiling and saying hello to random people, handing out cigarettes and American change to any and all who ask.

Faces swing into our orbit and out again like comets, trajectories forever altered by Oppie’s generous crack policies and philosophical musings. He is electric and alive. His interest is insatiable. Lecturing as he walks, he relates mind-bending scientific concepts with ease and grace. We are a team. Although nobody recognizes him, I feel proud to be partying with such a distinguished man of science. Prostitutes approach him and he respectfully tells them he has no interest in “erotic labour” but gives them rocks and kind words. He is a gentleman.

Sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park, we form an accidental alliance with a Native kid whose face, crusted with glue, is making sad and sluggish approximations at consciousness. Oppie is offering him the pipe, but I don’t think he even sees it. Oppie blows out a hoot and continues with a conversation I wasn’t sure we were having.

“Take this young man, for example, Hank. Here is a fellow theoretician, a physicist; he studies zero as we infinity. He’s asking the same question we are, but he’s approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with base assumptions, attempting to divide everything by zero. And as you well know, it is at these extremes, these margins, these points which a curve will avoid like poison gas that things really get interesting!”

“You can call it whatever you want, I guess, Oppie, I think he’s just trying to kill himself.”

“Oh no, not kill.” He is scratching under his shirt collar. “Destroy, Hank — he seeks to destroy himself.”

When we leave, I turn and see that the kid has managed to stagger after us for a few blocks. But he can’t keep up.

Oppie ducks into a corner store to buy more cigarettes. I’m straining to remember what it was Oppie actually did as a scientist. I know he made the bomb, but I’m not sure why or when. I can only remember his picture.

I decide to ask him when he returns. “Oppie, when you were working at the place in the desert with all the other scientists, all working together like you talked about, did you imagine making a better life for people in the future? I mean, did you wonder about how things would be for them?”