Sleepwalk

It was disconcerting to live in a time in which accepting reality required a suspension of disbelief.

There's a rare few that are able to drift through life without being owned by someone.

First you submerge a hundred-microgram tab of LSD in a 150-milliliter miniature bottle of vodka, then you give it a shake and leave it in a cool, dark place for forty-eight hours or so until the LSD dissolves. I like to take what they call a microdose every couple of days. Just a few drips from an eyedropper, maybe a fifth of a tablespoon. It’s sub-perceptual: you don’t even hardly notice it in the day-to-day, but it does a nice job of bringing the wonders of being alive to the fore and pushing the horrors a tiny bit back. Which is an important survival technique. Voilà! The bliss of temporarily giving a shit.

No doubt in the great scheme of things we are all of us the offspring of murderers. Right?

Constant forgetting is the best cure for all your maladies of anxiety and depression and self-loathing and despair. Rx, Rx, Rx.

The memory of it comes to me like a blow to the face, the way all true memories do, unasked for, unwelcome, a full-body possession.

I remember that feeling—the growing momentousness of every whimsy that occurs to you, the way each object your eye touches has a glimmer of potential symbolism and insistent uncanny import. I remember sitting in my room in Mrs. Dowty’s rooming house and filling notebooks with pages and pages of rushed writing and drawings, sharpening and resharpening my pencil until it was just a nub. The sudden burst of molecules exploding inside you so that you had to abruptly leap up and dance wildly in your stocking feet, tears running down your face, crying with happiness and grief all at once. The world was terrible and beautiful to behold. Sometimes you could stop it with dancing. Sometimes you couldn’t.

reckon it was some combination of these things, the feeling that I was separated from the rest of the people of earth by an invisible wall, like a fish in an aquarium.

You have to wonder about these settlers of the Great Plains. These white people who in olden times killed the natives and laid claim to this dirt and stuck to it; who stranded their children and grandchildren with a birthright of dust. A collection of clapboard shacks with backyards full of unmown pigweed and junked cars and abandoned swing sets and withered, thirsty trees. Was the genocide worth it?

I like to be adventurous in this, and so today I have a carrot, turmeric, a clove of garlic, frozen mango slices, half a banana, apple juice, and a shot of whiskey.

I can’t tolerate cell phones,” I say. “For health reasons.” “Yech,” he grunts. “Those things ruined the country. I don’t know how, but they convinced the people that they should spend their whole lives inside a screen the size of a playing card. I’d take a jail cell over that bullshit any time.

For all we know This may only be a dream An old Nina Simone song.

One of the things I’ve observed about white folks who grew up well-to-do: they have a deep investment in the idea of merit, and there’s a special scorn, I’ve noticed, for the poor of their own kind. They may acknowledge that race plays a role in keeping people down; they may even be sympathetic to the plights and sufferings of certain marginalized groups—but white trash is trash for a reason. They can’t help but feel they deserve their position above the fat janitor or the rapidly aging waitress or the bashful handyman—If you were smart, you would’ve gone to college, they think. If you were ambitious, you would have done something with yourself. We worked harder, they think. Our parents instilled proper values, they think—and … well. We. Just. Have. Better. Genes. I think of Patches, the way his eyes grew softly, twenty-watt condescending when he found that I’d never been to high school, let alone university. “You’re self-taught!” he said, as if I were a talking monkey, and he showed his upper teeth in a way that he didn’t mean to. The sneer he’d inherited from generations of good breeding, not on purpose. I can picture the lips of Cammie, and I know she’ll be trying not to make that expression. But I’m afraid that the more she knows me, the more disappointed she’ll be. So I say nothing. The Guiding Star glides past Newcomerstown silent and aloof, and the ghosts of the Delaware tribes watch from the woods. Soon enough, we’ll be joining them in oblivion,