Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is J. Robert Oppenheimer and I’d like to thank you for this opportunity to speak before you this evening. I want to commence by buying everyone in the house a beverage as a sign of my esteem and gratitude.”

No one cheers because no one is listening. A synthesized slide guitar strikes up the next song.

“No takers? Good, because I’m all out of money, which means there are only a few ivory nuggets left between me and something dark and unknowable.”

Oppie clears his throat. Someone yells something in the crowd, but it’s not directed at him.

“Crack cocaine, ladies and gentlemen. Some believe only the truly unhappy enjoy it, or rather need it. However, this hypothesis seems flawed. I have found its benefits extremely promising, but sadly not without cost. Like most things, it is a good servant but a bad master. Thus I believe control to be paramount, wisdom and knowledge trumping blind fear and temperance. To speak of regret is to ignore realities and inevitabilities. Humanity, my friends, must experiment — that is its nature. Want versus need, nature versus nurture: these questions seem redundant, boorish. Knowledge cannot be outlawed. It must be doggedly pursued! Alas, eggs are broken, unfortunate experiences are experienced, but, however, in my opinion, humanity is stronger for it.”

No one is listening. Oppie sways feebly in the awful stage light. His hair is grey and sparse, his cheeks hollow and triangular. He looks so different now from my science-book photo. He is pacing the stage, compulsively touching and scratching his face as he speaks. He looks like one of this neighbourhood’s regular discarded men, who in a dirty tweed suit is taking an unscheduled narcotic vacation from the drudgery of his blister-packed medication.

“And so I stand before you, yet I am dead of throat cancer, as my colleague pointed out so perceptively earlier this evening. How is this possible? Who can say. What is possible is that if I go to sleep I will never wake up.”

I wish he had a lectern, something to put his hands on.

“Therefore, I must conclude, further study is merited. And I must forge on — like Currie, with radioactivity humming in her oblivious cells — with courage, conviction, and a deep, unshatterable hope and faith in the value of this experiment. And for this greatly undeserved opportunity, I humbly thank you.”

The woman, still wearing his hat, stands, clapping proudly. When he gets back to the table I ask him if he wants to leave, to go back to my room and just talk science and smoke cigarettes. He says I haven’t heard a word he’s said all night.

Conclusion

We are in the parking lot next to the bar.

On the street, the car is waiting for Oppie. It billows grey smoke as it idles. A sheet of paper taped to the back window indicates it is insured only for today. I know her boyfriend is behind the wheel, but I don’t look in because it doesn’t matter. Oppie is leaving.

“We are going to go and appropriate a few computers from the university library and sell them in an effort to procure some powder cocaine that Brenda here is going to cook and formulate into some real pure samples, genuine freebase, no more vials and uncontrolled specimens,” Oppie says as I load our last rock. I want to tell him to stay, but I am too tired and confused and plus I don’t really want him to.

He does not ask me to come with him and I do not want to go. I’m worried I will regret it. I’ve never smoked real freebase. Someone else will be helping him now and they will probably do a better job than me.

I hold the pipe to Oppie’s lips a final time. He exhales and his voice is a scoured whisper. “Well, that’s the last of it, Hank. You truly are one of the finest minds of your generation. How I’m going to miss your steady hands and gentle flame.”

He is really tweaking now, his eyes drifting inquisitively to pebbles on the pavement, his shoulders and arms whipping restlessly like he is trying to get rid of something disgusting taped to his back. As if he is trying to shed his body entirely.

The car is honking in the street and I’m going to cry.

“These people are not scientists, Oppie.”

“No, but they can help me — they know things, my boy.”

“Were you serious about worrying you’d never wake up?”

“I guess so, Hank. I’m not sure. Crack may not be the panacea, but I enjoy it like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I refuse to stop. Not now, not when I feel I’m so close to a breakthrough.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t take better care of you.”

“Nonsense, I planned for all this to happen.”

He touches my shoulder and it twinges painfully. He says, “To be frank, I think the world in which I shall live, from now on, will be a pretty restless and tormented place; I do not think that there will be much of a compromise possible for me, between being of it and being not of it.”

I watch him get into the car and he is gone again.

Her younger sister, Wanda, called that morning to ask if she wanted to move into her coach house. “What’s a coach house?” said Bernice. “It’s like a smaller version of our house, but on our property,” Wanda said.

Many years ago, when Bernice was still in the shoe department at Woodward’s, Wanda was hired as a medical secretary by a brutish orthopaedic surgeon, owner of two of the hairiest arms Bernice had ever seen. They wed after six months of secretive courtship — naturally, there was already a wife — after which he treated Wanda to a smorgasbord of plastic surgery and whisked her off to Kelowna. Now they spent half of the year in Dubai while he, in the twilight of his career, girdered together the bones of the inconceivably rich and she chased golf balls about an island of irrigated turf in the centre of the desert. Wanda called weekly when back in Kelowna, speaking mostly of wine tours and the chore of locating good-quality home furnishings for their expansive lakeside palace, which Bernice had seen only in photos.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Bernice imagined a series of houses cracking open like Russian dolls, smaller and smaller until the last revealed itself as a tiny pink stucco matchbox.

“What would I do there?” she said.

“Relax?”

“What about the store?”

“Oh, haven’t you been doing that long enough?” “And where would I put my things … in this … coach house?”

“Well, of course you’d have to downsize,” Wanda said.

This new word chafed Bernice like ill-fitting slacks. Downsize seemed so smug and perniciously simple, as if the physical evidence of one’s life, and the space it occupied, could be erased just like that.

“I couldn’t. Why would I leave? I’m comfortable here, and there’s so much to do,” Bernice glanced about her apartment, eyes landing on just a few of her beloved things. Wanda called her stubborn and Bernice said she’d think about it, immediately steering the conversation to the custom walnut deck for which Wanda was suing a contractor for poor workmanship, a saga her sister would never resist retelling.

On May 14, 1978, while sorting laundry in the basement of their building, Bernice had found a dry-cleaning ticket in the pocket of her husband’s trousers. She stopped into the cleaners on her way to work the next day and exchanged the ticket for a green evening dress with a mink collar, almost twice her size. She laid the dress over the kitchen table that evening and waited in the living room doing a crossword. Gus came home from work and entered the kitchen. She heard his keys on the counter. She heard the icebox open and close. Then, without a word, he left their small apartment. She waited up, but he did not return, that night or any other.