Come Up and See Me Sometime

“What do you do?”

“I’m an economist. I’m working on a book.”

“What’s it about?”

“The economy. Doom.” I guess I didn’t have any expression on my face, because he threw his hands up and turned to his desk.

I watched him work. Every now and then he looked up and said, softly, “Please please leave.”

So I went home. But I came back.

THIS STORY is about drugs. I’m telling you now because I was surprised, too. But there’s more that you need to know.

Cliff thrilled me. He knew words like “anarcho-syndicalism.” He stood in front of the television set during the evening news and said, “Fuck,” whenever scenes of genocide or military strife flashed on the screen. I stared at him. This was real to him. I looked back at the images and tried to stretch my imagination so that it was real for me, too, all the rape and starvation and guns.

Cliff hunted deer every year, up north near Cimarron. He used every part of the dead deer, even tanning the hide himself. He used the deer brain to do it by mashing it up with a bunch of salt. It’s called a “brain tan.” He told me that every mammal on the planet magically has just enough brains to tan its own hide.

Once we went up to Ojo Caliente to jump in their hot springs. Afterwards, at the package store, Cliff broke out in fluent Spanish. I stared with my mouth open. He and the shopkeeper talked for so long, I just sat in the dust and waited until they were done. The whole ride home, Cliff kept accidentally slipping into Spanish until he stopped talking at all.

In a bar, while Cliff’s friends were playing pool one night, he told me that he had grown up in Salt Lake City, as a Mormon. “I grew up believing that when you die, you get your own planet.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Whatever you want. You’re god.”

“Isn’t it lonely?”

“You choose your neighbors by marrying them.” Cliff raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“Do women get planets?”

“Nope. Sorry. They go to their husband’s planet.”

Cliff told me that in the Main Temple in Salt Lake City, they have an office ready for Jesus, complete with a desk, separate phone lines, pens and paper. “Mormonism is all about real estate,” he said.

“What was it like for you, growing up like that?”

“When you figure out that no deity is keeping tabs on how often you brush your teeth, it’s a little depressing. I mean, what’s the point?”

“Cavities.”

“I mean, to everything? Existence?” Cliff stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Nothing. No point.”

I grew up with no religion, so I don’t have these existential crises, although I respect them in others. I never thought that I was living for the sake of a god. I was just a human being. So it came to be its own point. Life.

WE HAD been dating for months and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have sex with me. There were many things I didn’t understand. Sometimes I lay on his bed while he wrote or read. I rolled onto my side.

“Cliff?”

“Honey?”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing, that’s all right, baby.”

“What do boys want?”

“Girls.”

“That’s it?”

“Some boys want other boys.”

“What do you want?” I asked. “I mean, what do you want?”

“Socialism.”

“What do you want?”

And on. Me naked, him reading something, with a cigarette between his teeth.

So I was stupid to have been surprised when I opened the door to his bedroom and found him with a needle in his arm.

We stared at each other for a second. He looked down and pulled the needle out.

“So,” I asked clearly, “are you addicted, or just a dick?”

He turned around and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a bag of needles, razor blades, a scale, a mirror, a bag with a thin layer of white dust, and a small plastic container with a chewing-gum-sized wad of black, sticky stuff. He spread it all on the bed.

I picked up the white bag and cocked my head to one side.

“Cocaine,” Cliff said.

I touched the plastic container with one finger. “So, this is heroin.”

He opened the container, turned it upside down and then smacked it against the mirror until the wad fell out. I looked at it and its reflection.

“How often do you do this?”

“Once a week. Once a week for three days. Or four. Not so much the rest of the week.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Cliff touched my face.

I tapped the mirror with the heroin on it. “How much of this stuff does it take to kill you?”

Cliff picked up a razor blade and nicked off a small dab. It was the size of a sunflower seed, smaller, even. I looked at the rest of the heroin lying on the mirror. I had a sudden urge to put the whole gob in my mouth and swallow it.