Turning Angel

He walks toward the door, but before he opens it, my eyelids fall, and I snuggle under the warm blanket that heroin has thrown over my soul.

Cyrus was right about the passage of time. Soon I had no idea whether it was day or night, whether five minutes had passed or five hours. The heroin came and went like a warm tide, and my consciousness waxed and waned with it. People came and went, too, but I paid scant attention. An elderly black man in a uniform. A white girl. Jaderious Huntley. A teenager. And always Blue, who administered my heroin as lovingly as a gifted nurse. If Cyrus looked like an NFL cornerback, Blue was a nose tackle. Blue was Refrigerator Perry with a kind face. Blue was my nurturing angel.

Heroin was something else.

Heroin was an epiphany.

Suddenly all the disjointed images I’d never understood made sense: the generations of Englishmen who gave up everything to lie in opium dens in India; the ragged junkies in the Houston court system; the Scottish fuckups in Trainspotting; Tuesday Weld inDog Soldiers; even Frank Sinatra shooting up in The Man With the Golden Arm, back in my father’s day. This was why those people did what they did. This was what they were after. You go your whole life without understanding something. You know people who do it-who are even obsessed with it-but you feel no pull yourself. And then you experience it.

And the earth shifts on its axis.

I think the fact that I’d tried other drugs in college created my misconception of heroin. Marijuana took away anxiety, made my head thick and mellow. Powdered cocaine-the three times I tried it-sent me into a euphorically controlled high, during which I felt capable of anything. But heroin short-circuits pain right at its source. It bathed me in a primitive bliss that must indeed be the closest thing to the womb. Hour after hour, I lay half comatose on the floor of the lab, trying to get my conscious mind around what was happening in the base of my brain.

I couldn’t do it.

Eventually I realized that time was indeed passing. Drew’s trial had begun. Cyrus showed me copies of the Examiner. The changing front pages showed photos of Shad, Drew, Quentin, even me. But it was all so far away, like something happening on the other side of the world. I knew I should fight what was happening to me, but how could I? Blue outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and Cyrus wore his pistol all the time. He even wore it while watching DVDs in his recliner.

He watched them on the little thirteen-inch Sony on the counter against the wall. Even when he wasn’t watching movies, he played them. His taste surprised me. He watched a lot of science fiction: the original versions of The Thing and The Planet of the Apes; Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He watched conspiracy films from the seventies: The Conversation, The Parallax View. War films: The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. Perhaps most surprising of all, Cyrus watched westerns. He seemed to choose his westerns by their stars: Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda. And he watched The Godfather -over and over again. I figured his cinematic tastes might have developed during his service in the Gulf War.

Most of the time Cyrus ignored me, but he would talk to me about movies. He was stunned and pleased to learn that The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apeshad been written by the same man. I remarked that he seemed young to be a fan of such old movies, and he laughed. ”Mama had a boyfriend,“ he said. ”All that guy did was watch HBO and TNT Classics. He never worked, man. He had a job as a bag man for a guy who ran numbers, but that was it. He’d just watch movies and drink. I’d sit there with him all day long, eating fish sticks and watching movies. I got to liking them. Like meditation, you know? That’s why I run them all the time, the way most people listen to music. Movies are my drug, man.“

He showed me a newspaper article with a picture of my father above it. He said Dad had hired private experts to mount a search for me. I asked if I could read the article, but Cyrus refused.

”You just keep cool,“ he said. ”Pretty soon the jury’s gonna convict the doc, and you can go home to your little girl.“

I peered into his eyes, searching for deception. ”Why wouldn’t I be a fool to believe that?“

Cyrus grinned. ”Good question. But you got people on your side you don’t even know about.“

”What do you mean?“

”Let’s just say the word’s out in the community that I might have you. And I’m hearing things about making sure you don’t get hurt. Del Payton’s widow’s making some noise, for one.“

Althea Payton is the widow of the factory worker whose murder I solved five years ago. In the matrix of Natchez society, she’s the equivalent of Coretta Scott King.

”Then there’s the preacher of Mandamus Baptist,“ Cyrus goes on, ”where your maid went to church. Quentin Avery’s put in his two cents’ worth. And then there’s your daddy’s patients, which seems to be about half the black people in this town.“

This gave me some real hope. ”What about Shad Johnson?“

Cyrus laughed hard at that. ”I think he’d be fine if you didn’t make it.“

I laughed with him, trying to foster some sense of comradeship. Cyrus might be a monster when it came to his business, but he seemed sincere about letting me go. If he wasn’t, why hadn’t he killed me the first day? My best strategy was to wait out Drew’s trial and do nothing to upset my captor. Drew and Quentin would have to make it on their own.

As always, when the effects of the heroin began to fade, manic anxiety began building in my mind. But Blue returned and injected me again, and again I felt content to wait out my term in the wilderness.

Soon, Cyrus and Blue left to ”make a run somewhere,“ as they often did when I was on the nod, so I decided to make a trip to the restroom. I threw off the top half of my sleeping bag and forced myself to get up. I told my feet to walk, but they refused. They were asleep. I stood there for a while, waiting for my circulation to normalize. Then I tried to walk again. No progress. I looked down at my feet. They looked strange. They were the wrong color. Almost blue, really-especially the toes. I reached out for the wall to stabilize myself, then slowly rose up and down on my toes. After about a minute of this, the feeling slowly returned to my feet. As my toes woke up, the blue faded away.

I figured it was no big deal.

Chapter 36

I’m going to die here.

I’m going to die because Cyrus White has no real knowledge about the human body, and because in the end-as he told me in the beginning-he doesn’t really care if I survive or not.

Three days ago, as best I can remember, my feet began to burn. Around the same time, my hands and face began to tingle. I wrote this off to the heroin, but the symptoms didn’t abate between fixes. They got steadily worse. Two days ago, when I sat on the commode, the underside of my thighs began to burn. I tried to ignore the stinging pain, but after thirty seconds I had to stand up. A half hour later, I tried again. Same result. My skin couldn’t tolerate the pressure of the toilet seat without intense pain. That’s when the paradox hit me: I was mainlining a powerful painkiller, yet I was feeling pain.

That night, my chin went numb and stayed that way. Then the hair on my head began standing up in different places, like a fear reaction-only I wasn’t afraid. This erection of small groups of hairs coincided with the onset of shooting sensations in my face, much like electrical shocks. They weren’t acutely painful, but they were icy cold and they left numbness in their wake. By morning I had to sit on the commode to urinate, because I got dizzy trying to stand. I couldn’t stay seated long enough to finish, so I squatted over the bowl like a girl in a nasty bathroom.

What the hell was happening to me?

If I stood erect for any length of time, my hands would grow painfully heavy, as though overfilling with blood. When I held them up to my face, I was shocked to see that my palms were dark red with a bluish cast. Only by holding my hands above my head could I get the blood to drain out of them.