name was worse. It was
This, this is so the type of emissary my stone-ground, whole-grain mother would hire. Here is the winged Mercury meant to facilitate the exchange of our eternal mother-daughter bonding. He’s smiling, showing an asymmetrical mismatched nightmare of bony teeth. His stretched lips quiver with the effort. When his smile fades and his twitchy, jaundiced eyes quit darting around the room, he slowly lowers himself into one of the chairs and leans his elbows on his knees. With the paper tube still stuck in his nose, he says, “Little dead girl? I need to get with you on your level.” He draws a deep breath and blows it out to collapse his rag-doll chest. As he leans over the glass table he aligns the tube with a fat rail of powder and begins to anteater the white poison.
DECEMBER 21, 8:33 A.M. EST
Ketamine: A Brief Overview
Gentle Tweakers,
If your parents failed in their duty to introduce you to a wide variety of controlled substances, please let me enlighten you. My own progressive mother and father left nothing to my childhood imagination. Not licking sun- dried toad skins. Nor sniffing oven-baked banana peels ground to a mellow yellow dust. As other parents labored to introduce their finicky offspring to raisin cassoulet or rutabaga goulash, mine were constantly admonishing me, “Maddy, sweetheart, if you don’t drink your glass of Rohypnol you won’t get any tiramisu for dessert.” Or, “You may be excused from the table after you finish every bite of that PCP.”
As children the world over might sneak their spinach or broccoli to the family pet, I was always sneaking my codeine tablets to ours. Instead of being boarded at a kennel, our poor dog was constantly being shuttled off to rehab. Even my angelfish, Albert Finney, had to be dried out because I was forever dropping Percodans into his aquarium. Poor Mr. Finney.
Ketamine, Gentle Tweeter, is a common trade name for hydrochloride. It’s an anesthetic that binds to opioid receptors in brain cells, and is administered most often to prepare patients and animals for surgery. It comforts victims trapped in terrible car crashes; it’s
Ketamine comes as a clear liquid, but you can spread it on a cookie sheet and bake it to a grainy powder. Ah, the memories… how often did I walk into the kitchen of our house in Amsterdam, in Athens, in Antwerp, to find my mom wearing pearls and a flowered apron, sliding an aromatic tray of fresh-baked Special K out of the oven? To me the meth-lab reek of cat urine and battery acid evoke the same flood of comforting associations that my peers might find in warm Tollhouse cookies.
Once you’ve chopped the grains to a fine white powder, simply sniff it as you would cocaine for a euphoric buzz that lasts roughly an hour.
In room 6314, as if to demonstrate all of the preceding, Mr. Crescent City leans over his cache of powdered K. One of his hands holds his braided pigtail to the side of his head lest it flop. His other hand squishes one nostril shut while the other nostril tracks the dusty trail. Like an upstate farmer plowing a dirt field, he completes one line and begins the next. When his nose has left the glass table clean, still bent double at the waist, Mr. Crescent City freezes for a moment. Not looking up, not standing upright, he says, “Don’t be scared, little dead girl….” His voice muffled near the tabletop, he says, “I’m a
“It’s ironical,” he says, “but I’ve got to die to make a living.” At that Mr. Psychic Bounty Hunter pitches forward, crashing face-first through the glass.
DECEMBER 21, 8:35 A.M. EST
Hail, Maddy
Gentle Tweeter,
In room 6314 a dead scarecrow lies splayed in an explosion of broken coffee table. Strange as this admission may seem, this is not the first time I’ve stood alone in a room with a dead man on the floor at my feet, surrounded by shattered glass. Be patient, and a pattern will soon emerge.
How to describe what happens next? To date, I’ve suffered as an inmate of Hell. I’ve done battle with demons and tyrants and stood atop lofty cliffs overlooking majestic oceans of bodily fluids. Alive, I’ve been born aloft from Brisbane to Berlin to Boston in a Gulfstream as groveling minions plied my greedy mouth with peeled grapes. I’ve watched, albeit unimpressed, as my mother rode the back of a computer-generated dragon to a castle built of simulated rubies while drinking a Diet Coke in dramatic slow motion. Still, none of that has prepared me for the following. I step around the fallen Mr. Crescent City and crouch for a closer look. The floor is graveled in crystals of shattered safety glass. The rolled paper, the cover from
The naturalist in me—the
Sitting on the bed, I say, “My name is Madison Spencer.” I nod toward the photo of me and my mother unfurled on the floor.
The figure, I’ll venture, is Mr. Crescent City’s spirit. Anecdotal evidence suggests that ketamine users can depart their physical selves. The consciousness of the intoxicated person detaches. The soul leaves the sedated body and is free to travel, according to the not-exact testimony of numerous drugged-out Special K abusers.
The spirit glances from me to the photo and back to me. He drops to his ghost knees and touches his forehead to the carpet at my feet, his hairy braid flopping against my Bass Weejuns. His voice muffled by the carpet, he says, “Little dead girl… it’s
Out of pure meanness I put a ghost foot forward and step on his vile pigtail.
A foul sputtering noise rends the air.
A second trumpeting blast follows.
The prostrate underling, he’s breaking wind. “Oh, great Madison Spencer,” he whispers. “Hear my prayer.” He lets loose a fresh—fresh?—round of flatulence. “Hurry and accept my tribute and praise, okay? I need to make this quick, because I only have a couple minutes before I go back in my body, but I need to tell you about my holy mission….”
And the vile monster, he lets another rip.
DECEMBER 21, 8:38 A.M. EST
Boorism: The New World Disorder
