The sunlight floods through the rear window, the brown tinged liquid inside the little plastic cylinder becomes washed out. The hand holding the syringe becomes a bleached out silhouette. There’s a sudden infusion, crimson. It dances with the rust colored liquid, swirling around and reaching to the top of the barrel, toward the plunger. Then it all vanishes into a vein. The belt hangs off the arm, like in the movies.
The car sits on Figueroa under the overpass north of Temple. This is Los Angeles. Downtown. This is the Los Angeles of my adolescence. The Los Angeles that no longer exists. It is as real, now, as the needle, the barrel, and the plunger are; as material as the arm, the vein, and the belt, all nothing more than memory. The street, however, that is real. It remains. And I stand there, in the shade gathered by the serpentine concrete construction, the only part of the memory, the moment, the bleached out recollection of which I have no control, and had no control of then. Everything else was a choice and remains so.
It’s surreal, the way separating yourself from the apparatus that is your body feels. The arm, the belt, the pulsing. You push away from it. A spectator watching the way the light taps against the barrel’s plastic, the way the heroin and water seem to exist in stasis, the way rouge bursts cloud the mixture. Then it all floods the passages in which you exist. There is no separating, at that point, the material from the abstract, the metaphysical from the mechanism that pumps endlessly and relentlessly for life. This is it. The mixture a concentrated distilled expression of quotidian experience: the euphoria of being unmoored in the same way children exist in dimensions of their own imagining even as they construct themselves among us, along with the visceral rejection of reality and the cognitive dissonance which mitigates our understanding of how, often, what liberates us poisons us and causes us to wretch. There is no denying that the experience and the body are one, but there is no more distinction, nor does it matter.
In a world run by clocks, for some, it is necessary to remove the fingers pointing from the hands that dictate the day’s passage. The ones that develop the same rhythmic stride as the ventricles and chambers of the heart. The ones that constrict arteries and demand focus. This is one of the ways to dull the seconds even as they fall, to erase the little boxes around moments, to silence the voice that asks again and again: what have you accomplished? It is, however, one thing to find yourself an audience for the time-lapse sequence in a film, in which the shadows dance into the light of morning and the morning melts into the horizon’s dark and the ever growing mass of lifeless forms is struck by the sun’s light again, but it is quite another to find yourself in the moment after your life has lapsed. And like that, it was night, in Los Angeles, so many years ago. The day had continued without me, the earth itself hadn’t so much as contemplated a pause, as I had floated in the ether which existed above and inside of me, at once. And I have no memory of what that was like, that transition, that moment, moving from being everything, connected to everything, and returning to the vessel of my being. What I remembered was the ether.
There is nothing in this world which is not required of life, which comes naturally. We do not think to breathe, we do not think to blink, we do not choose our heart to beat. But all those things which we choose, we choose willfully.