The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [18]
I don’t know how else to tell this but straight no chaser. These dramas … these over the top horror stories seething with blood and immorality … they made me feel better. Like television does. Less like a damaged daughter. A failed student. A slut. An athlete gone to seed. And what was in the basement helped feelings leave my body altogether, so I didn’t need to know who I was, or why, or anything at all.
Two.
Three.
One.
When I walked into the basement the second year, I was nearly always by myself. I didn’t care who else was there. I didn’t care what the room looked like. What posters were on the walls. What the shit brown couch had all over it. What did interest me was the set-up on the table. There sat a spoon and a tray with cotton, a lighter and a syringe. I picked the spoon up and put it in my mouth. Monty said “huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu huh where do you want it?”
I said “Here,” and slapped my arm hard enough to raise a vein.
Zombie
FOR PART OF MY LUBBOCK LIFE I BECAME A ZOMBIE. Not a flesh eating one. Gross. I’m no cannibal. No, I was of the high functional type, like so many of the people around you right. This. Second. We’re everywhere.
In zombieland I met an M.D. one night at a club who snorted enough to drop an elephant. His license plate read “DR IS IN.” I met a cop with chronic back pain from a gunshot wound who smoked it rolled up in little brown cigarettes. I met a Mexican sculptor who cooked it up with peyote. I met a woman who took care of toddlers during the day and left reality every night and came back to tend to children in the morning with droopy eyelids. My creative writing teacher, two swimmers, a football star, the owner of a popular restaurant, musicians, artists, and oh yeah. Junkie zombies.
I liked the fang of the needle. I liked chasing the dragon. I still like watching the action of a syringe in an arm. It actually makes my mouth water. Even in movies.
30 seconds from being to nothingness.
And I liked how my life, and what it was and wasn’t, simply left.
When you enter zombieland, everything looks a little like it is underwater. Slow motion and thick. Other people look a bit cartoonish - their movements too quick, their mouths and eyes sometimes taking on weird shapes, their arms and legs occasionally morphing into snakes or animal heads. Sometimes you find yourself giggling at inappropriate times. Also, things are sleepy. Like in a lucid dream.
Actually, it’s exactly like lucid dreaming. According to neurobiology, in a lucid dream, the first thing that happens is that the dreamer recognizes they are dreaming. When the area of the brain that is usually off during sleep is activated the recognition of dreaming occurs, the dreamer must be careful to let the dream delusions continue but be conscious enough to recognize them. It’s a process some people theorize as the space between reason and emotion.
The zombie is also in this kind of space between reason and emotion - and more. Ask any high functional zombie - or a recovered zombie - and they will tell you right away that life was like awaking dream. Boy howdy. Though for some it is a nightmare beyond language.
In a general sense, for me it was cool in zombieland. For example, I could sit in one spot all day and look at light changes on the wall with absolute fascination until night fell. Another time I dipped my hand in blue paint again and again and covered a white wall of my apartment with hands. Though I admit at one point the hands became menacing and threatened to consume me, later they were again benign, even able to sing me to sleep through little mouths on their palms.
I guess now that I’m thinking about it, zombie state is also a good deal like hypnosis or meditation. In hypnosis or meditation, you shift awareness from the physical world and enter the deeper world of the subconscious. Sometimes this makes your regular body go numb. Neither zombies nor hypnosis/meditation folks are freaked out by