Telluride Magazine winter/spring 2017 by Deb Kees

66 • FICTION

www.TellurideMagazine.com

morning. A scrambled bit of egg escaped my mouth and hit the plate. Its brief contact with my palate had turned it an unnatural red, the color of maraschino cherries. “Do I look funny?” I asked Clete. Clete shrugged. “I’ve known you too long to say.” The food sated something in me deeper than hunger. Three walls of the diner were made of plate glass that needed cleaning, and we spent a long time watching a smeary light shift over the pines and aspen and wide stretches of high grass. The waitress had big eyes and narrow shoulders. Her nametag read “Kale.” She knew Clete and would only talk in his ear, which made me a little paranoid. “I’d introduce you,” he said, “but she doesn’t like talking to strangers.” “Is this really the right line of work for her?” She went from table to table, listening and nodding, pointing to the menu. She’d whisper to one person, who’d speak to the others. “Her legs are nice,” I said. “Every man in here is half or more in love with her,” Clete said. He got her to scrape leftover eggs onto our plates. “This guy’s omelet has a

WINTER/SPRING 2016-2017

weird spice,” I said. Clete forked a bite and savored it a moment. “Cigarette ash,” he said. We stayed in the diner until the eggs and coffee had worn down my chill. Clete paid the shy waitress, and we hit the pavement again, happy for the heat of the sun. He carried a white paper bag bearing the diner’s logo—a possibly cross-eyed elk. Inside were packets of salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, and nondairy creamer. Twenty minutes down the road, the peak of a tall black construction crane appeared. We watched it a long time before we got close enough to see the van. At the end of the crane’s long metal wire was a big round magnet, which snapped onto the van’s roof. Tireless and thoroughly defeated, the van rose up into the air. We joined the others—a crowd had gathered—in applause when it was set down on a flatbed truck. This was a terrible loss for us, but it was a great spectacle. “We can kiss that one goodbye,” Clete said. “My worldly possession is in there,” I said. There was nothing to do but get the bag of mushrooms and hike back to Val’s.

This series of events—losing my coat and the drugs and other secrets and luxuries of my life, along with being given a new name by someone mumbling out of a coma, and encountering the not-quite-naked-or-dead girl to whom I gave the shirt off my back—combined in an almost scientific way to make me swear off drugs. I was twenty-nine years old and wanted to change before I hit thirty. Clete and I developed a plan for me as we ambled back, a plan that would work all that summer and beyond. Even after I left the mountain, it stuck. The plan had four parts. One: I would not get a job. There’s always some guy with a goatee and great weed to turn you on during a break, or some friendly braless girl tired of washing dishes or mowing the graveyard or sweeping up the pencil shavings in Rosa Parks Elementary School who lights a joint or drops a line and offers to share. Work was a haven for drug users and I couldn’t risk it. Two: I’d use willpower and the help of friends who, even if high themselves, would discourage me from joining them. Three: The mushrooms, being organic and free, didn’t count. Four: In order to be realistic and give the plan half a chance of working, I would stay drunk as much as possible. A few people—including you and the therapist they assigned me when you had the flu—have since pointed out that as many people are done in by booze as by any drug or family of drugs. But Clete and I saw it differently. Being drunk was a momentary lapse into happiness, like drifting off while listening to a song about sex, whereas the drugs I craved were symphonies. They played at that low level just below the timbre of thought, a mattress of sound you could sleep on for days or a lifetime. Liquor relaxes the brain and lets the fool in you rise up, while the drugs I loved kept me still inside myself, permitting me to reside there in something like peace. That’s a hard thing to give up, and it’s easier if you’re drunk. We moved in with Val and lived in the dog-sitting house three months. Without rehab or an arrest to keep me in line, I became Keen and did no drugs. You asked for a happier time. That was it. \

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oming down from the mushrooms, I realized how high we had been and how long it would be before we were fully grounded. Along with that came the tedious desire to have never taken the stuff. With psychedelics, there was always a lingering descent, during which time you were not high but could not sleep or relax, like a hangover that begins while you’re still drinking and spoils the whole evening. It comes with a bottoming-out feeling. The designs you’d imagined and the new light that you’d shed on your life grow dim and dull and disappear as you nosedive. Your mind strains to retain some sense of what it was that had you smiling and optimistic, but you can’t touch it. The dream of the high, as well as the high itself, vanishes, and the asphalt’s cracks remind you that you’re no kid and less young with every plodding step. Hallucinating has taken you no closer to understanding what it is you mean to do with your life. Clete and I marched down the wide street to the heart of the little town, the bare streets and dark houses clucking disparagingly at us. In one window, beyond gauze curtains, an orange light licked at the dark world and dim figures crossed and recrossed the floor. A cold wind taunted the domestic bushes along the street and made my skin prickle and bump. I had lost my shirt to the approximately dead girl and longed for shelter, my nipples turning to squat little stones. “I should have brought my coat,” I said maybe a hundred times. “We’re at ten thousand feet,” Clete said, removing his shirt and handing it to me. “The nights are always cold.” He was wearing a wife-beater underneath. I buttoned up the shirt, which was several sizes too large for me. When we turned on Main to head out of town, the sleeves rippled like a swath of skin separating from my body. Morning arrived. The sun should have heated me up, but my body held tenaciously to the cold. We stopped at a diner on the highway and ate eggs. Clete told me about the party, as if I hadn’t been there. Stu had come around enough to have several drinks and pass out. “His essential movement is to seek unconsciousness,” Clete said. Our booth had bad springs, which put our heads close to our eggs, a handy convenience this

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