Every medication from the drawer had not just one story like this but several. Pale pink Tegretol hauled across the Caucasus by caravan under cover of night, the only man in the world capable of manufacturing it unaware that his creation was being packaged and sold to people in the hated nations of the West. Xanax, certifiably the medication that came from space, traded to the architects of our shadow government in exchange for a full map of human DNA, the eventual future costs of this trade arrangement unspoken but plain as day to everybody involved, a rash of suicides and disappearances cropping up when the uselessness of the medicine for anything beyond mild sedation was revealed. Ludiomil, the one the drug companies were lying to all the doctors about, telling them it did one thing when really it did another, all the while advising baffled treatment teams that one of Ludiomil’s side effects was to make patients lie about how it made them feel; and so the doctors kept right on prescribing it to treat something it didn’t really treat, blind actors in a study whose actual aim would never be known by anyone. I made up these stories when they brought me the medications with my breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I refined them some after I’d been sent home. Everything became infused with purpose. It’s hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense.
There was also Darvocet. Darvocet had some stories, too, but unlike the others they were all true. I had learned them in real time: I’m burning from the neck up. Every repaired bone feels like it has been electrified. Every thought or emotion I have is focused on the pounding pain in my face, which feels as big as the side of a barn. I hurt so much that I would trade anything for relief, do anything, hurt anyone. I remember the day I tried to make a deal with the deviclass="underline" how stupid I felt, how I cried to know there was no Satan to help me, how there was only the medication they’d give me when I couldn’t pretend I didn’t need it anymore. Which I tried to do all the time; I hated how much I needed all the help they gave me, hated needing to call the nurse, hated feeling like my greatest success would be in making childhood my permanent condition.
Somewhere in the middle of a long night, between one dosage of Darvocet and the next, I made a promise to myself. I remembered it now. I’d promised myself that all this was temporary, the medication and the bed in the room where the blinds were always down, and that I would get out of it somehow, get away somewhere, do something again with little reference to any of it. I didn’t promise myself future success or total recovery. Just escape. I remember that it was dark in the room when I came up with the promise, and that I had a special way of wording it that I swore to myself I’d never forget, and I noticed, now, shaking the Darvocet bottle with a few tabs left in it, that of course I had forgotten whatever the special magic words of my promise had actually been. They had been scattered to the winds long since. I don’t think I can explain why it made me happy to learn that I’d been unable to keep my promise to myself, but it did. I felt so content to have forgotten: like I’d been touched by a blessing so obscure that almost no one would ever share in it, or no one I’d ever know or hear about. Like I belonged to a tiny secret brotherhood of people who’d forgotten something hard.
I arranged the bottles into a loosely octagonal formation on the counter, and I pictured a very small person sitting at the center of the octagon, no bigger than the distal joint of my little finger, bored but safe, half-crazy from isolation but protected from the outside world. That person was me. My parents would have asked the younger me, what do you want to be safe from? After the accident nobody would ask. That was, to put it harshly, the best thing about the rifle blast that destroyed most of my face.
I saw a show about music one summer on that TV. I saw it twice.
They were showing it on TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, “fifty thousand watts of power broadcasting from Costa Mesa, California”—I watched TBN a lot, because when all the other stations had powered down their transmitters for the night, TBN stayed on. After a while I started to notice patterns in the way they operated, and I came up with theories about how things worked at TBN. For example: sometimes you’d feel pretty certain you were seeing the same show twice, but I became convinced this was never actually true; maybe there’d be the same hosts and the same guests going over the same material, and it’d seem like you were watching the same thing you’d watched once already, but there were variations if you looked hard enough. I learned to look very hard. Sometimes their voices would sound different, more strained or more awake, more tired or somewhat softer. Gradations in tone. And sometimes they’d just look less involved, a little more distracted, a little less believable. But everyone would still pretend the conversation hadn’t already taken place, that all these questions hadn’t already been answered to everybody’s satisfaction.
And then sometimes, not often but for me always with a profound feeling of revelation, the conversation would go to a new place: not too far off the script, but somewhere just down a side path, for five minutes, maybe, or even less. Things would briefly open, and, in the opening, possibilities would emerge. Jan, with the high-piled hair, would remember something her mother used to say to her; or a guest would be reminded of a story he’d heard from somebody in his travels, and he’d lose the thread somewhere in the middle of the story but keep right on telling it. Or a musician from the in-studio band would say something like “That’s the first time we’ve played that song in a while,” but when you saw the same show again two nights later he’d say “We don’t get to play that song as much as we used to” instead. Or a visiting preacher might swap out a story about his trip to Houston for another about his home parish in Phoenix. Or someone would carry out a Bible verse for an extra line or two, heading off into parts unknown before breaking abruptly off.
When I saw the music show the second time it seemed like there were more of these glitches than usual. The show was about Satanism in music: apparently bands had started encoding Satanic messages into their songs by recording the music backwards, and teenagers were being won over for Satan through this process. They had a couple of experts on the show as guests, and they said that rock music, which had become the most popular music in the world, was being used by the devil to get his message across. Does the devil actually have his own message? This seemed like a big question for me when I was thirteen and up late on summer nights.
They introduced one guest as a guy who’d been a rock musician for many years before he’d started living for the Lord. He was there to explain how the messages got put into rock music, whether it was something people did on purpose or some more subtle process from the spiritual world; his mission was to spell out what the messages meant in greater detail, because sometimes they were hard to understand, and it was important to know what was out there. “Some of the stuff that’s out there,” he said, “it’s really amazing, what’s right out there under your nose.” He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space between those two possibilities, drifting.
It was hard to follow, but as near as I could figure it, singers whose hearts were in the wrong place were vulnerable to demonic influence when they wrote. They wouldn’t know when the process started, and it would take hold of them before they knew it: they became emissaries then, messengers carrying sealed envelopes. They sang songs they felt they’d written but actually hadn’t, and if you played them backwards, they spread the message of Satan.