Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [114]
I walk to the liquor store, get my bottles and return home. I drink. Why couldn’t I let Pighead’s gold Pighead be what he meant it to be: a message? He knew he’d be dead when I got it. It was his way of finding me.
Yet, I drink. And I feel sick with myself that I do.
I sit at the computer and get lost, drinking, smoking, going deeper and deeper into the screen. I am rereading Pighead’s old e-mails. There are dozens of them and I read them all. Drunk now, I am looking for something I missed.
“I miss you,” he writes. “And yet, what can I say? It seems that you will always think I am asking so much—too much from you. When all I want is your company. Just a movie, just some time. But you’re always busy, advertising or drinking or, I don’t know, Augusten. I’m just so tired.”
In bed, I turn off the light and the dark pulses around me. My eyes adjust, the thick black dissolving, giving way to shapes in the room—my bookcase, a mound of magazines, some years old. And then I see the spider. It moves quickly from one corner of the room, along the seam where the ceiling meets the wall. I think it has something to do with my eyes adjusting to the dark. But I watch as it pauses, and then changes direction. It’s big, and its apricot seed–sized body is supported by long legs. It waits. Does it see me? Carefully, I reach over and turn on the light. I do this without moving my eyes from it; I do not want to lose the spider. I will turn on the light and see if it scampers away and if it doesn’t, I will get a magazine and squash it.
The light is on and the spider is not there.
And this is absolutely impossible, because my eyes did not leave the spot for one instant, my finger turning on the lamp switch beside the bed by feel. But the spider is gone.
It defies reason. I go to sleep.
The next evening, I drink again. I finish the first liter of Dewar’s and then go to the cabinet to hold the gold Pighead.
I feel its weight in the cup of my hand. Gold is heavy. For the first time I think, This must have cost him a fortune.
It scares me to have the Pighead exposed to the air in my apartment. The air feels filthy, as though it will contaminate this treasure the way I feel contaminated myself. I place it back in the cabinet and sit at my computer.
I type chatty e-mails to friends in San Francisco and I am okay. I finish both bottles.
I go to bed and I see the spider when I turn off the light. Tonight, there are many spiders. The ceiling is filled with them.
I turn on the light and there are none.
I understand now that I am hallucinating. In rehab I learned that chronic, late-stage alcoholics hallucinate. Seeing spiders is, in fact, not uncommon.
I go to sleep feeling impressed with the powers of the mind.
The next morning, I am sick. I feel like I have the flu. My lungs hurt. I have a fever. I cannot move.
I have been in bed for ten hours. It is, in fact, not morning but afternoon. I put a pillow over my eyes, tucking it around the bridge of my nose so I can breathe. I sleep.
When I wake up, I feel worse. My body aches, as though damaged.
I understand that I will not drink today. I will not smoke, either. I am too sick to drink or smoke, my interest in both replaced by the knowledge that I am not afraid of death. I feel like shit. If I died, it would be okay. The cliché When you have your health, you have everything is very true. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.
I sleep for another ten hours. When I wake I am shaking all over. I hold my hand out in front of me and it vibrates.
I feel worse.
My heart is racing. This, in fact, is what woke me up. My heart beating so wildly in my chest that it woke me from my dream, like someone pounding on the front door.
I sit up in bed, pillows stuffed behind me. What the fuck?
That night, I am worse still. My whole body is shaking and hives are making swift