So that added another project to my daily rounds: preparing concentrated endolin. The analyzer’s scales have a beam, so that whatever gravitation I’m in will give constant readings. I now have fifty-three pounds, Earth weight. That’s almost all the plastic bags I can spare. It’s enough to cure all the hangovers in Japan. They can stir it into their tea.
What a narrow, limited life this is! And how it has grown on me, how I take to it so easily! I am not homesick and I am not lonely anymore. Or if I am lonely I don’t know it. Sometimes I think I swim in loneliness the way a fish swims in water, unaware that it is wet.
In my third month I began to shoot dope in dead earnest. My veins swelled with morphine and my brain became a hot fog, burning with euphoria. Sometimes there were nightmares. I saw in sharp detail De Quincey’s three old women, constructing themselves with gold knitting needles, their bodies self-knitted and self-purled for me. One resembled Aunt Myra, but when I spoke her name she looked away. Eventually all three burst into white flame and I heard myself screaming.
At the start of the fourth month I stayed on my back in bed for over four days, until the Shartz machine’s morphine reserve was gone. When I finally got out of bed I fell to one knee and thought for a while of never getting up. I might have stayed there and died if I hadn’t been hungry. There was a large pail of water by my bedside, but no food. I hadn’t eaten in four days. My stomach felt stuck together and my head was primarily a pulse.
I pulled myself up and slowly walked outside, like a sleepwalker. It was midday and I squinted. At first I thought I was seeing another hallucination: the plants in my garden were black. I blinked and stared and scratched my funky armpits. Hair came out and stuck under my nails. For some reason the soles of my feet were sore. It was no dream. My garden had died. Black as sin. I fell once on my way to the lettuce—my dear lettuce. The leaves were like huge flakes of ash and they became powder in my trembling hand.
I stooped to my carrots and dug three up with my fingernails; what was beneath the ash leaves were brown crumbly shafts with a sour smell to them. I sat in the center of my garden, surrounded by ash and bad smells, and I remembered lying on my bed in chemical bedazzlement and looking out the door to see a black rain falling from the lavender sky and smoke rising from my garden as the rain hit my beloved plants. I had taken it for hallucination, on a par with the three self-knitted maiden aunts—the kind of thing that goes away. It didn’t go away.
I lit a cigar and continued sitting. My hands still shook but my head was beginning to clear. What I needed was a dozen raw eggs and a bottle of whiskey, but I let the cigar be my pacifier while I added it up. Clearly there was more to this planet than met the eye. It had pulled a fast one on me, with its death rain. What would have happened to my body had I been outdoors during the rainfall? Would my skin have gone the way of the lettuce? Must I now escalate my imitation of Robinson Crusoe and make myself an umbrella out of what was available? I dropped that for a while and thought of food. The Isabel would not be back for months. I had four boxes of irradiated meat behind the cabin and two dozen cartons of dried food by my sink. There was a large supply of vitamin pills and protein tablets.
I had a frightening thought, bit down on my cigar and pushed myself up. I padded back to the cabin and then around it, to where the meat was stored in sealed plastic cartons. My premonition was right; the rain had eaten through the cartons, turning them gray. Inside each, where lamb chops and steaks and pot roasts had lain ready for cooking in molecular suspension, now lay stacks of individually wrapped hockey pucks—dark and shriveled and smelling to high heaven or whatever it was above the inscrutable Belson sky. I stepped back from the smell and stared upward for a long while with an Old Testament feeling, wondering what celestial visitation this perverse planet had prepared for me. In my mind were the words spoken to Job: “I alone am escaped to tell thee.” Son of a bitch.
Nothing fell from the sky on me and I did not become covered from sole to crown with sore boils, although I was ready.
I thought of a fissure in the obsidian nearby and walked over to it. I grabbed a handful of endolin and crunched it down raw, without a chaser. The taste was bitter and clean in my dry mouth. Then I went back into the cabin, opened up my one window to let some of the bad air out and then washed my face with the water left in the bucket. That felt better, and by then the endolin had eased my head.
Along the far wall of the cabin was a long moonwood shelf with over a dozen plastic cartons of dried food. I took a deep breath and walked over, a part of me thinking that surely nothing could have happened to my dried beans and potatoes and synthetic protein. But another part of me knew exactly what was going to be the case. I broke the heavy seal on one of the cartons and lifted out a plastic pouch of what should have been dried eggs. Inside was a light-brown mush—a kind of compost.
I ripped open the pouch and let the stuff fall into my left hand. It felt like rotten leaves and burned my skin lightly. I touched a bit of it to my tongue. It tasted like acid. I shouted a Chinese imprecation I’d learned as a student and hurled the mess out the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I was going to starve to death, and soon. I was already four days into it.
It was no way to go, and I knew it. I went over to my Eames chair, trying not to think about my stomach and the way it was beginning to come back to life, and seated myself slowly. I put my naked and dirty feet up on the ottoman. There was a distant humming in my ears. I clasped my sweaty hands behind my neck the way I had learned to in the Great Orbach’s office and played his sturdy old Viennese voice in my head: “Relax, Ben. The first thing is to relax.” I concentrated on my scalp and forehead, relaxing them. It didn’t work. I was tense as hell, as though I were made of stiff, vibrating wires. I looked across the room toward the drug synthesizer and saw a small white mound of fresh morphine powder sitting in its hopper. I quickly averted my eyes. There was not enough yet for an overdose anyway. I knew that I could, if push came to shove, make hydrocyanic acid—or for that matter nicotinic—and erase myself in a half minute. The modern world makes death one of the easiest things in life. If only it worked as well for sex, love and work.
I tried again to relax, concentrating on my calves and thighs. They felt in need of nourishment. There were flaky spots—my grim vegetable ashes in miniature—before my eyes. There was acid in my stomach. The humming in my ears grew louder. I remembered my near-suicide in Mexico, fifteen years before.
I was in my mid-thirties and so empty inside, so disappointed with life and with all the money I was making, that I began over a long number of sterile weeks to focus my attention on euthanasia. I’d read about it in Scientific American and saw a segment on it on a TV show. The new pills had been invented in Germany. Naturally. They were illegal everywhere but Mexico and Bolivia. The Life-Arrest pill put you on hold for up to a thousand years, as long as your body was encased in a box or tube. No refrigeration needed. They had places in Mexico to store you, tagged and ready for revival in the century of your choice. You popped one and you were rigid in three minutes, with no pain, no consciousness. The antidote was a brief flash of high temperature and a massive electrical shock in the chest, like the Frankenstein monster. If you didn’t trust Mexican engineering—and who did?—you could be shipped back home in the suspended state without legal problems, as long as you had a birth certificate and some other I.D.—like VISA. There was a place in Brooklyn that would store you underground, safe from nuclear attack and the IRS, and bring you out of it at the appointed time. Nobody explained what course your resurrected self was to take if there had been an H- or R-Bomb attack during your sleep. Maybe there would be another pill and a glass of water on your bedside table.