The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch
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at a club who snorted enough to drop an elephant. His license plate read “DR IS IN.” I met a cop with chronic back pain from a gunshot wound who smoked it rolled up in little brown cigarettes. I met a Mexican sculptor who cooked it up with peyote. I met a woman who took care of toddlers during the day and left reality every night and came back to tend to children in the morning with droopy eyelids. My creative writing teacher, two swimmers, a football star, the owner of a popular restaurant, musicians, artists, and oh yeah. Junkie zombies.
I liked the fang of the needle. I liked chasing the dragon. I still like watching the action of a syringe in an arm. It actually makes my mouth water. Even in movies.
30 seconds from being to nothingness.
And I liked how my life, and what it was and wasn’t, simply left.
When you enter zombieland, everything looks a little like it is underwater. Slow motion and thick. Other people look a bit cartoonish - their movements too quick, their mouths and eyes sometimes taking on weird shapes, their arms and legs occasionally morphing into snakes or animal heads. Sometimes you find yourself giggling at inappropriate times. Also, things are sleepy. Like in a lucid dream.
Actually, it’s exactly like lucid dreaming. According to neurobiology, in a lucid dream, the first thing that happens is that the dreamer recognizes they are dreaming. When the area of the brain that is usually off during sleep is activated the recognition of dreaming occurs, the dreamer must be careful to let the dream delusions continue but be conscious enough to recognize them. It’s a process some people theorize as the space between reason and emotion.
The zombie is also in this kind of space between reason and emotion - and more. Ask any high functional zombie - or a recovered zombie - and they will tell you right away that life was like awaking dream. Boy howdy. Though for some it is a nightmare beyond language.
In a general sense, for me it was cool in zombieland. For example, I could sit in one spot all day and look at light changes on the wall with absolute fascination until night fell. Another time I dipped my hand in blue paint again and again and covered a white wall of my apartment with hands. Though I admit at one point the hands became menacing and threatened to consume me, later they were again benign, even able to sing me to sleep through little mouths on their palms.
I guess now that I’m thinking about it, zombie state is also a good deal like hypnosis or meditation. In hypnosis or meditation, you shift awareness from the physical world and enter the deeper world of the subconscious. Sometimes this makes your regular body go numb. Neither zombies nor hypnosis/meditation folks are freaked out by this. In zombieland, when you are so relaxed your mouth feels lax as water and your muscles drop down into the warm flush, you are going somewhere important of the mind. Down and deep. Into the world of dreams.
But another tricky thing about zombieland is that in the dimension of dreams you might experience body distortions, vibrations, or weird shaking. The key was not to panic. It didn’t mean you were turning into a Quaker. It was normal. It meant your body was ready to “go” where your mind was taking it. It meant you were going on the nod.
And there is no such thing as time. No past, no present, no future. Or else they are all there at once. So the slowing and slurring of language, the heaviness in your legs, the oddity of your hands turning to giant leaden balls that swing slowly from your arms, the big wad of pillowcase in your mouth, these are all body modifications needed to go where you are going. Though I distinctly remember things going better when I did not leave the apartment. I had, for lack of a better phrase, night blindness and dumb girl head out in the world. Plus there was the problem of legs and arms.
Or maybe I saw the world for what it was, no place for a girl like me. Why not … leave?
There were other, not cool times. Like the time I woke up under an overpass with my face against asphalt in a pool of my own vomit with my pants down around my ankles. Or the time I woke up in some blond and blue-eyed Karate guy’s bed with leather twine around my neck. Or the time I fell from a second floor balcony and cracked my head, the woman with the latex gloves touching my forehead in the ambulance saying, “Lidia, can you still see me? Stay awake for me, Lidia. Good girl.” She looked like an underwater white octopus lady. Pretty though.
I’m a strong bodied person. And the thing of it was, the things I thought would kill me in my life, maybe even the things I wished had, didn’t. What, I distinctly remember thinking, did I have left to lose? Crossing the blood-brain barrier. The mind body barrier. The reality dream barrier. All that euphoria filling up the hole of me. No pain. No thought. Just images to follow.
I was a zombie for a spell in Lubbock. In Austin. In Eugene.
It wasn’t epic compared to the other wounds in my life.
Rehab and relapse and remember all start with the letter R.
What It’s Not
THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STORY ABOUT ADDICTION.
It’s not The Heroin Diaries and it’s not Trainspotting and it’s not William Burroughs and it’s not a Million Fucking Little Pieces, OK? I’m not gonna be on Oprah and I don’t have a series of meaningful vignettes to relate that can compete with the gazillion other stories of druglife. It’s not Crank and it’s not Tweak and it’s not Smack. No matter how marketable the addiction story has become, this is not that story. My life is more ordinary. More like … more like everyone’s.
Addiction, she is in me, sure enough. But I want to describe something else to you. Smaller. A smaller word, a smaller thing. So small it could travel a bloodstream.
When my mother tried to kill herself for the first time I was 16. She went into the spare bedroom of our Florida home for a long time. I knocked on the door. She said, “Go away, Belle.”
Later she came out and sat in the living room. I went into the spare bedroom and found a bottle of sleeping pills - most of which were gone. Alone in the house with her, I scooped up an armful of vodka bottles and pills and brought them to her in the living room, my eyes full of water and fear, my mind racing. She looked at me more sharply than I ever remembered, and more focused than I’d ever seen her. Her voice was weirdly stern and two octaves lower than the southern cheery slurry drawl I was used to. She said: “Stay away; this isn’t anything for you. I’m not talking about anything.” And she turned her gaze to the television. General Hospital was on.
I went straight into the bathroom and sat on the toilet and ate a wad of toilet paper. My face felt hot enough to ignite. I cried hard. That hard kind of cry that brings guttural grunting rather than sobbing. I muscled up my bicep and I punched the wall of the bathroom. It left a small crack. My hand immediately ached. How I felt was alone. Like I didn’t have a mother. Or a father. At least not ones I wanted. When I came out of the bathroom I felt a little bit like a person who could kill her.
It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps.
I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.
My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor assigned talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, “I’m done.” But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love.
When I was 17 my mother