Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [39]
“But you said you wanted to see Granada—that’s why we came,” she said, remembering our conversation in bed.
“I did want to see it again,” I said. “And I’ll come back again.”
“Fine,” she said, angry. I wondered if I would be the only American in history who visited Granada without seeing the Alhambra.
After breakfast we took a cab to the train station, bought our tickets, and had around an hour and a half to kill before the Talgo left. It wasn’t until we actually bought our tickets that I realized the last thing I wanted to do was to go back. We found a café and ordered more coffee and the caffeine along with Isabel’s jealousy inspired me to say, “Look, when we get back to Madrid, let’s just stay one night. I can get my work done and we can pack for a longer trip. Then we can take another train to Galicia or Lisbon or wherever.”
Isabel smiled at me, having gone at an alarming rate from anger to something more like pity. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to work.”
“Take vacation,” I said.
“I can’t,” she repeated softly, as if I’d asked her to marry me. “Don’t you have work too?” There was gentle derision in the question. For the first time, I took a joke about poetry personally.
“Is your work more important?” I asked, as if her work were guarding paintings.
“No,” she said simply. I was crushed by how easily she ignored my implication.
We spent the rest of our downtime at the café, then boarded the train, and passed the next five hours reading, napping, smoking, but almost never speaking. I missed my parents terribly. By day the Spanish countryside looked a lot like Kansas.
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Late in the fourth phase of my project I decided to up the dosage, to take two white pills each morning instead of one. I had enough; before leaving the U.S. I had been given a year’s supply, which required a special letter from my doctor, and earned me strange looks from the pharmacist, and I had already had a month’s worth of medication on hand before acquiring the stockpile, which I had then divided into several small bottles. Besides, I could always see a psychiatrist in Spain—if, for instance, I stayed after my fellowship, maybe teaching English. Or I could just stop taking the white pills when I ran out; I wasn’t really convinced they did much for me in the first place. When I began taking them, I had a very pleasant insomnia, reading until dawn without fatigue; that was the only significant side effect and it passed with regrettable speed. After that, I was never sure what, if any, effect they had; I’d considered going off them at various points, but each time I hesitated, wondering if in fact they were buoying me; maybe my lows would be much lower, insufferably lower, without them.
The white pills certainly did not seem to work for me the way they worked for some people; I always felt a few strains of rumination away from full orchestral panic, I was almost always acutely aware of the bones beneath the face. But then I drank and smoked in a way that made tracking the specific effects of the white pills difficult. The ritual of taking them, however, had become important to me, not because of some possible placebo effect, where the mere fact of ingestion steadied me, but rather because they were a daily reminder that I was officially fucked up, that I was undergoing treatment, that I had a named condition. It was a Eucharistic rite of self–abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating.
When I got back from Granada I began to spiral, not out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of small pitch. I had not realized how much I was invested in the idea that Isabel and Teresa were invested in me, and now that it seemed neither had the inclination even to feign serious investment, I felt not only rejected, but as though many months