The Optimist’s Apocalypse

More than once, I have almost blinked out of this world.

One time I was railing lines of cocaine and didn’t feel like I was getting high enough. Rubbing it on my gums, complaining to my friends about how weak it was, blowing a line and then sitting still and waiting for my veins to constrict and my face to go numb. I was drunk, too, as people often are when they snort too much cocaine, and I didn’t realize I’d done too much until I had, and then my heart swelled in my chest, my field of vision narrowed, and my nose dripped blood. I shut myself in the bathroom and held my head in my hands and asked my null-God—the God I called on in life-or-death situations but otherwise didn’t believe in—that I please be allowed to recover from this and if I did I would promise to stop doing drugs. And I did. And some time passed, and I did more drugs.

I was raised in a progressive atheist home by a mother who grew up Episcopalian and a father who grew up Jewish. My father, a doctor, told me that we are all matter and that death is the end. My mother, a spiritualist, told me that there were no coincidences but there was also no Old Testament God. I didn’t believe in a God—couldn’t bring myself to believe in a God—until I started using drugs. Then I had to name something, find something to pray to when I was sweating over a toilet bowl or collapsed face-down in the grass. So I chose null-God: God-but-not, a thing I could name but not define. A capricious ghost in the sky. Null-God provided a convenient armature on top of which I could drape my guilt.

One time I took research chemicals of unknown origin that made my friend puke and made me see two moons and nearly walk into traffic. One time I split a bottle of whiskey and did several lines of Adderall with another friend, and I felt as if my entire body was being flattened between two sheets of lead and my vision dimmed and I heard a small voice—my friend’s? null-God’s?—calling my name repeatedly. One time I smoked too much K2 in the middle of the night, became acutely manic, and ran to the ER wearing only socks and pajamas, demanding to see a doctor who could defibrillate me. One time I took twelve pills of gabapentin and dropped to all fours in my kitchen while the tiles of the floor dematerialized. Each time my thread was nearly snipped and then for some reason it wasn’t, and then I did drugs again.

One time, the worst time, I got behind to nod off; my body would do it whether I liked it or not, and I could find no place to pull over.