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xi.
THOUGH MY (SOMETIME) DAYS off had kept my dose from escalating too much, the withdrawals got uncomfortable sooner than I’d expected and even with the pills I’d saved to taper I spent the next days feeling pretty low: too sick to eat, unable to stop sneezing. “Just a cold,” I told Hobie. “I’m fine.”
“Nope, if you’ve got a bad stomach, it’s the flu,” said Hobie, grimly, just back from Bigelow with more Benadryl and Imodium, plus crackers and ginger ale from Jefferson Market. “There’s not a reason on the earth—bless you! If I were you, I’d get myself to the doctor and no fuss about it.”
“Look, it’s just a bug.” Hobie had an iron constitution; whenever he came down with anything himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.
“Maybe, but you’ve eaten hardly a bite in days. There’s no point scraping away down here and making yourself miserable.”
But working took my mind off my discomfort. The chills came in ten minute spasms and then I was sweating. Ru
None of this was as bad as I’d feared. But what I hadn’t expected to hit even a quarter so hard was what Mya called “the mental stuff,” which was unendurable, a sopping black curtain of horror. Mya, Jerome, my fashion intern—most of my drug friends had been at it longer than I had; and when they sat around high and talking about what it was like to quit (which was apparently the only time they could stand to talk about quitting), everyone had warned me repeatedly that the physical symptoms weren’t the rough part, that even with a baby habit like mine the depression would be like “nothing I’d ever dreamed” and I’d smiled politely as I leaned to the mirror and thought: wa
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more i
On the eighth morning I woke sweat-drenched after four hours’ bad sleep, hollowed to the core and as despairing as I’d ever felt in my life, but steady enough to walk Popchik around the block and come up to the kitchen and eat the convalescent’s breakfast—poached eggs and English muffin—that Hobie pressed on me.
“And about time too.” He’d finished his own breakfast and was unhurriedly clearing the dishes. “White as a lily—I’d be too, a week of soda crackers and nothing but. A bit of sunshine is what you are in need of, a bit of air. You and the pup should take yourselves out for a good long stroll.”
“Right.” But I had no intention of going anywhere except straight down to the shop, where it was quiet and dark.
“I haven’t bothered you, you’ve been so low—” his back-to-business voice, along with the friendly tilt of his head, made me look away uncomfortably and stare into my plate—“but when you were out of commission you had some calls on the home line. ”
“Oh yeah?” I’d switched my cell phone off and left it in a drawer; I hadn’t even looked at it for fear of finding messages from Jerome.
“Awfully nice girl—” he consulted the notepad, peering over the top of his glasses—“Daisy Horsley?” (Daisy Horsley was Carole Lombard’s real name.) “Said she was busy with work” (code for Fiancé around, Stay away) “and to text-message her if you wanted to get in touch.”
“Okay, great, thanks.” Daisy’s big important National Cathedral wedding, if it actually went off, would be happening in June, after which she would be moving to DC with the BF, as she called him.
“Mrs. Hildesley called too, about the cherrywood high-chest—not the bo