Snapshot: And This, Too, Is Life (Diary of a Fentanyl Relapse)

Like a drunken Pietà with Niy as a Christmas-in-July fag hag in place of Mary. On my part, as usual, I am King Baby - hear me roar! God, I miss college: Simpler days filled with less sophisticated (and less damning) substance abuse.

For Zack, who cannot see how brightly he shines; for the future.

First flesh is finished; second intentions are incomplete.

Summer sun hits like an unfinished course of antibiotics, leaving something vile in its wake.

A third-floor window opens onto the courtyard of a group of depressing projects with an optimistic name. A scattering of young kids and their ancient mothers walk by.

I press the doorbell, and Flaco's wife's head pops out of the window. Her eyes are down deep, deep in her skull.

She tosses me a napkin-clad bundle.

It is Schrödinger's drug parcel: Several pairs of eyes watch me catch it, and, simultaneously, several pairs of eyes see nothing at all.

I walk home, three miles of uphill as relentless as entropy, as dope withdrawal, as the decline of the West.

On that last subject, I wonder if an algorithm could save us.

Maybe one that - instead of pushing sex and lies, cheap argument and even more worthless humor - favored human nobility, transcendence: The moment that a quiet, decades-overdue apology passes between brothers; the two-beat pulse of a strong man's shoulder muscles as he decides then un-decides to throw a punch; the way that a tired and graceful woman swoops down to create some tidy beauty at the end of an already labor-filled day.

Call it the Triple A, the Archangelic Algorithm (Awe, Ascendance, Altruism).

With a digital superstructure like that, could humanity stop being so goddamn sick of itself? Maybe even fall in love with itself again?

I've become convinced that hardly a single human being believes in God anymore.

Granted, Republican senators still signal Him with special foot taps from within the stalls of airport bathrooms; Democrats must first consult with their lobbyists and lawyers and PR consultants (really, all of them are lawyers).

This prospect - the total absence of belief in God - makes me vaguely uneasy. Even if He isn't real, I suspect that believing in Him made many of us better.

Then again, does He really deserve it - for us to believe in Him?

Maybe Armageddon will arrive when the last shadow of the final smidgeon of belief in God vanishes from the human race.

***

"My dad, he went into the closet, and I don't know - he put something around his neck - and when he came out, he wasn't alive anymore."

This is the first sentence that Lana, a first grader, says to me.

Last fall, she and her older brother, Peter, discovered their father's corpse as the reward at the end of the world's most twisted game of Hide and Seek.

The pair are atrociously needy. They cannot stop talking - they talk even on the inhale - and they require constant, endless reassurance, and it is never, ever enough.

Then again, how could they not be like that?

I wonder if their father was aware that, statistically speaking, on the day that he walked into that closet and hung himself, both Peter's and Lana's lifetime suicide risk shot up, rocket-like and irrevocable, into the many possible futures in which one or both of them join him in premature, self-selected death.

I wonder if he would've cared.

I wonder if He would've cared.

I am more like Lana and Peter than I am like my colleagues.

It is Too Hot Tuesday, and everyone else in the building is dressed in beachwear.

I alone wear long sleeves; green-purple blossoms of bruise and a hot, red patch of mounting infection decorate my forearms, so I am unable to participate in the day's theme.

Something about me says Tell me; I will listen; I won't judge; I am sincere; I will understand. My colleagues unburden themselves of tales of twelve-hundred-dollar water heater repairs; narcissistic sisters who ruin birthday parties; children scheduled for minor medical procedures.

I picture my forearms while they confess to me, and it makes me feel both dirty and superior. I have a sudden urge to walk into the teacher's lounge and roll up my sleeves.

I wonder how they would feel if they saw it, my years of self-tattooing.

Would they feel foolish for not having realized?

Would they be concerned for me or worried only for the students?

My students, I know, would understand.

***

I have always had these bruises.

I remember how I paid for my first friends, an older boy and girl who brought me weed and alcohol. I stole the money from my dad; it never occurred to me that there was a different way, that the pair might want to hang out with me.

I always liked to lie. I started out as adequate and improved vastly with time.

Reality was never enough; stories sustained me.

The whirling void inside of me whispered that Your life is a story, too: Say it, shape it, you are no-one anyway.

I remember how one time, apparently apropos of nothing, my grandpa - Marine; Catholic; dependable General Motors man - turned to me to say, "Brian, don't ever let your soul go to waste."

I realize now that he must've seen or felt something coming, just like he told everyone to keep their eyes on Barack Obama years before anyone else knew that name.

Maybe it was how quickly I became attached to sleeping with a fan. How it started one week when I was sick and staying over at my grandparents', and how after that, for years and years, I was so attached to the sound and the separation and the protective air passing over me that I couldn't sleep without one.

I, too, felt something coming when I was younger.

One day, while I was walking in the oldest, most sepia stretch of Northeastern woods that you can imagine, just as they became dark enough for me to forget that I was too old to be scared of walking alone in the woods, I heard my mom and my grandma's voices screaming my name - impossibly loud and resonant; adrenaline-drenched; as though warning me of mortal danger.

I wonder now if the panging void that I felt on the long, long walks and rural runs of my teenage years was really some kind of folding over of space and time: If it was all the pain and punishment of the future reaching back to claim me, thereby guaranteeing their own future existence.

Sometimes, Time itself seems like a cyclical gang rape, like sticking a needle over and over into the same abscessed flesh.

No lube, no alcohol wipes: Just repeated violations by the same cast of mostly unwelcome characters.

***

I stride through Strathmore, one of the most well-to-do neighborhoods in Syracuse (not that this says too much).

Each house is different here - poker-faced midcentury moderns next to Tudors with lead-paned, latticed windows stuck here and there.

To outsiders, I lie about my home city. I advertise its affordability, the lakes and wineries nearby, the quaint little towns, the proximity of the Adirondacks.

Really, Upstate New York has been on the decline since the end of the Erie Fucking Canal.

These days, Cuse is a city for losers like me, people who couldn't hack it downstate in the City but didn't have the vitality or vision to head out West.

Our greatest immigrant influxes come from places like Syria and Afghanistan, where people still mount human heads on fence-spikes.

If there is one thing about my hometown that I appreciate, though, it is this: That those at the top and those at the bottom are so hopelessly jumbled up. Two miles can take you out of granular, ghetto-volumed urban hell, past manicured mansions to the beginning of the endless, swimming-pooled suburbs.

I remember the story of my mom's law partner's wedding, when toward the end of the swanky afterparty, Jim opened the doors of the hotel to let the street people come join in.

In Cuse, you can shake the hand of an investment banker, then pass his crackhead brother flying a kite two blocks on. Sometimes, the investment banker and the crackhead brother can be the same person, even.

We are all jumbled-up like that here.

Inevitably, it gets weird.

Sin and crime are omnipresent: I grew up on stories of cheerleaders being fed through mulchers; County Coroners burying inconvenient body parts in their backyards; surgeons carving their initials on patients' insides.

Ours is a town both warped and wicked.

Occasionally, though, when the neurochemical melee inside me resonates with the terminal-capitalist chaos outside, I sort of dig it.

Occasionally.

I pass by the apartment building that I almost burnt down 12 years ago thanks to an impromptu Klonopin nap while I was intending to boil pasta.

"That's what the Fire Department's for!" The old hippie lady who owned the building reassured me.

These days, the only thing that the Fire Department ever seems to do is respond to fentanyl overdoses.

***

"My dad, he went into the closet, and I don't know - he put something around his neck - and when he came out, he wasn't alive anymore."

I make it up the hill and to my apartment.

"Watch it, feel it; really stay with it this time," I urge myself as though there is something to learn, as if mindfulness will lift me out of addiction.

I cut open seven bags, efficient as a surgeon, and empty them into my oversized spoon (I am a traditionalist as far as drug paraphernalia is concerned).

I scrape each bag with an old ID until there is not one fleck of fentanyl remaining in any of them.

When I started using fent, I remember, one of these bags (snorted) put me out for three to four hours. Three or four of them probably would've ended me.

Now, I need seven or eight at once simply to get unsick, to break even.

Allow me, my Dear Reader, a pharmacologic rant:

There is no opioid less suitable for street use than fentanyl.

Its doses are measured in millionths of a gram, and thus it is nearly impossible to cut and titrate properly.

It has incredible mu-opioid receptor affinity and is therefore difficult to reverse in OD.

Its half-life is so short that it is the crack of the opioid family. You've got to use every few hours or you'll plunge precipitously into withdrawal.

Because of the short half-life, too, tolerance and dependence build rapidly.

What's more, there is little functional territory between slumped over and sick in which one could, presumably, theoretically, live daily life.

I have never, ever had a chemical master so unforgiving.

Fentanyl has tired me out in ways that heroin, oxy, Xanax, butalbital, coke, booze never did.

When there is a lovely pile of it in my spoon, though, I don't think about any of that. (What's that saying? "The beauty of addiction is that you either have one big problem or no problems at all").

I throw out the empty bags. I hide the remaining ones so that they don't get pinched or flushed if I overdose - depending on which family member finds me.

I study the pile of powder for a final moment. I admire how the fentanyl has flaked up, the way in which the puzzle-piece chunks of it lean against each other like little demented houses of cards.

My last needle looks like something from a vintage horror movie. I call him Frankie, short for Frankenstein's Monster.

Frankie is a dreaded long-tip, bad news for someone like me, who has already shot through most of his accessible major veins.

The plastic rod that moves Frankie's plunger kept popping out, so I've recently had to superglue it in place (after which, alarmingly, a thin filament of superglue was extruded from the tip of Frankie's point as he rested overnight, and I writhed in my bed).

Blessedly, Frankie is ready for duty today. He slurps the solution up through the cotton in one long go.

The suction seal from the plunger is imperfect, though, and there are large stretches of air bubbles in the barrel. I turn Frankie upside down and flick, flick, flick the barrel until all of the air is gathered at the top, and then I push it out.

When I see the first tiny drop of fluid form on the tip of the needle, I know that it's ready.

I kneel down in front of my bed with my forearm resting on top. I have always done it this way.

I wrap a long, white, '70's dad sock around my upper arm, and I study the map of bruises along the underside of my forearm.

It has been too long since I used; my veins are constricted with withdrawal.

I move to my vein of last resort, a bulgy little guy garlanded around the base knuckle of my right index finger.

I push Frankie in about a third of the way.

I draw back and rejoice as I see streamers of red fill Frankie's belly like little Chinese New Year decorations.

Stay with it, I remind myself.

I hover there for a holy moment, on my knees, between sickness and splendor, and I can feel it: I am starting to get high even before I press the plunger down.

Frankie's plunger can be difficult, sometimes, like a cantankerous old man, but it slides smoothly down this time.

I am in dopaminergic freefall for a few seconds. Pleasure so strong that it's slightly uncomfortable surges through me.

I raise my right hand, now holding the needle, in the air as the high hits. Three or four minutes later, I come to with my hand still in that position, still kneeling down in front of my bed.

I have performed this ritual thousands of times - tens of thousands of times, maybe. It is everything to me, and yet it is never, ever enough.

For the next hour, I lay on my bed, desperately trying to enjoy the high.

I browse forums; I read small snatches of To the Lighthouse; I look at pictures of handsome men.

Fentanyl is used for anesthesia for a reason, though, and the sedation is too much for my exhausted body. I fall asleep.

When I wake up 90 minutes later, I am already starting to get sick again.

***

"My dad, he went into the closet, and I don't know - he put something around his neck - and when he came out, he wasn't alive anymore."

I have finally pushed this relapse as far as it can go.

A late paycheck, an AWOL dealer, a holiday weekend, a series of other unfortunate coincidences and deeply deserved karmic kickbacks conspire to shipwreck me in sobriety.

I am further into withdrawal than I have been in a long time. I have had no methadone for four days, no fentanyl for almost 36 hours.

The somatic phase of opioid withdrawal has come and gone; I don't even notice the flu-like symptoms anymore.

There is no liquid left to puke or shit or sneeze from my body.

I lay on my bed, so awake that it's agonizing, so sensitive that every small shiver registers as an electric shock.

There is something so leaden-dreadful, so soaked-cold and pointillistic about the reality that strangles me now; I will never be able to capture even its fleeting emotional afterimage in words.

I survive the night by listening to music down low, so soft that ordinarily I'd barely be able to hear it. The music has a strange, tinny quality. This jangly audio distortion is unique to fentanyl withdrawal, in my experience.

I watch scenes from Marie Antoinette set to "Plainsong," and I'm swallowed by this truly indescribable upwelling of emotions - almost as though I'm feeling everything it's possible to feel, all at once, maximally. It is almost spiritual, to feel like this again.

At the same time, it is painful, really cruel and torturous to my soul, to watch these moments of love and bravery and humor and heartbreak.

I see and feel keenly now that when I am on drugs, I diminish my humanity.

What is terrifying in this moment is not how much of myself I have lost, though, but how much of me, right now, still remains.

I picture these reunions with myself - ever rarer through the years - with the timeless, fuzzy stretches of intoxication in between, my true self emerging at these sober nodes like an electrochemical message jumping down a myelinated nerve axon.

"My Brian came back to me," my partner says at the end of a phone call.

Neither one of us has mentioned addiction, drugs, withdrawal, but Jay knows. He always knows - it is so obvious to him, I marvel.

I wonder if I am far enough along in opioid addiction now that it is not really possible for me to live without them anymore.

Doctors used to speak frankly of this point of neurochemical no return.

I wonder what I would do with that information, if I knew it for sure.

I ponder, just for a moment, if maybe I could turn it down, the next time I have a chance to use. If this could really be the fabled Last Detox, for me.

I don't believe it.

Deep down in my soul's DNA, where the most unspeakable truths of our lives lie in wait like undetected cancers, I don't believe it.

There is a part of me that doesn't want it, the clarity and the feeling; there is too much of me that needs the drugs too badly - too much of myself, also, to hide from.

I am too weak; I can't stand discomfort.

I want my fan, my desserts, my novels, and my opioids.

I am King Baby; hear me roar!

But for a moment, it hangs there in front of me: This possibility of hope and a future. Of a future without this.

It shimmers there in front of me like ectoplasm, pulses like a living thing; I can see that tentacles reach out from it in every direction.

***

"My dad, he went into the closet, and I don't know - he put something around his neck - and when he came out, he wasn't alive anymore."

I survive the pain because there is no other choice for me but to survive it.

If I don't survive it, I will never get high again.

I wake up, I take my methadone; I get through work, and then I get high.

And this, too, is life.

***

Fam,

Not my most well-planned or polished piece, I know, but I wanted to get something down while I was going through it.

To everyone who has commented or messaged me, thank you for the support, truly. It is beyond anything that I have felt before and far beyond anything I could have expected.

School will be over at the end of next week, at which point I will be able to take care of my own issues head-on. Currently exploring options for (full) fent / methadone detox, Bernese Method transfer to bupe, and other possibilities.

Hoping to have better news soon!

I love you all! B.