“The house—it took me like an hour to reach it. But soon as I set eyes on it, I knew—yeah. This is the place. I didn’t even count the street numbers. I knew. Everything else was so fucked up, but this was plain as day. It was like I’d been there, like everything’s already happened, and now I’m just, like, followin’ myself around. Like time is all mixed up . . .
“House is old. Nothin’ in there. No pictures on the walls, no carpets. Bare boards, wooden furniture. It’s kinda creepy. Guy there lets me in. It’s like he owns the place, or maybe rents it, and his wife or girlfriend, she’s there, too, only she’s pissed, she’s in and out and she is so mad, I guess at what is going on, an’ at me, too, but she don’t come out an’ say it, so I think, hell, I’m gonna brass this out, an’— “An’ there’s my guy. Johnny fuckin’ Appleseed, sat at table with this big case open up in front of him, an’ inside, there’s like, rows of plastic tubes, full of rocks an’ powders, some just shades of gray but some are yellow, brown or kinda reddish, an’ I realize, everyone he gives it to, we all get something different. It’s like trials, like in the hospital, y’know? Clinical trials. An’ I said so, too, ’cause he says to me, ‘This,’ he says, ‘is science. It’s science and religion an’ it’s everything,’ an’ he checks his papers an’ he looks along the row of tubes an’ tells me, ‘This one’s yours.’”
“‘This one’s yours,’” said Silverman.
“I’m in the place I said I’d never get. He dusts me. And I have, like, one clear moment, just as I take it—like there’s something, somewhere down inside me, an’ it’s laughin’, ’cause it’s won. Some bad part of me, maybe. Or the devil, you know? An’ I don’t feel high. I think I will but instead, it’s like I’m shrunk up, like I’m this big, an’ my whole life’s just fallen in on me. I’m shit, I am human waste—I wanted to get high, but I get this! An’ I just break down. I fall onto the floor, and wail . . .”
“And Appleseed. What did he do?”
“That’s the thing. He watched. He sat there, he’s got his shades on, though there’s hardly any light. An’ he just watched.
“You know how guys get off from watching sex? He’s like that. He is leaning forward, I can’t see his eyes, but even so, they’re burning fucking holes in me. An’ he’s watching and it’s like he’s making notes inside his head. Like I’m a fuckin’ rat, you know, a rat in an experiment. An’, shit. ’Cause that’s right. Yeah. That’s all I fuckin’ am.
“He never tries the stuff. He never touches it. He’s got like, latex gloves. An’ he’s leanin’ forward on the chair, an’ he’s talkin’ to me. Real quiet now, real gentle. ‘Tell me what you see,’ he says. ‘A room,’ I say. ‘Describe it,’ he says. ‘It’s just a room!’ but then I start, an’ as I’m tellin’ it the details seem to stand out more and more. I see the grain in the wood an’ the way the shadows fall across it, an’ all these things that you don’t usually notice. An’ he says, ‘What do you hear?’ an’ I say, ‘nothin’,’ an’ again, he gets me to describe it, an’ I gotta say somethin’, so I say about the traffic on the highway. ‘What else?’ he says. I say, ‘The wind,’ but I can’t hear the wind, except that, once I’ve said it, yeah, maybe I can, though there was no wind earlier, nothin’ at all . . . ‘Tell me what you see.’ We’re back to that. An’ I look around the room again, only it’s changed, an’ I describe . . . I dunno. Like when I look into a corner, an’ I look hard, now I see things. Like the house is bigger than I ever thought, and the walls go further back, like I’m seeing round a corner that I never knew was there. An’ it’s dark out there. It’s dark an’ empty, an’ he tells me, ‘The god is gonna talk through you now, Stella,’ an’ I say, no, I say, I don’t want that. I tell him, take it out of me, take it out! An’ he just smiles. Smiles, says, ‘Too late.’ An’ I’m cryin’. I can’t explain it. But I am so scared of what I’m gonna see, ’cause I know it’s there, I know there’s somethin’ an’ I do not want to see it, not now or ever. An’ I look down, an’ I see this—this thing— “An’ it’s my life. I see it there, windin’ away from me, it’s like this little vein, just wrigglin’ in the dark, this one bright line, an’ it’s like, this long, you know?” She stretched her hand. “An’ the dark is huge an’ it goes on and on an’ my life is like—it’s nothin’, yeah? It’s fuckin’ nothin’, my whole life, it’s barely—it’s like, I could hold it in my hand, it’s just so small. An’ he’s there, nodding, an’ he’s real polite, he tells me, ‘Thank you, Stella. Thank you.’ He says, ‘Here and gone.’
“An’ I don’t know what to do. I am lyin’ on the floor, I don’t know what to do, how I am gonna get back, get back to that life, I am just floatin’ in the dark, an’ my life, it’s down there an’ it’s so, so small, an’ . . .”
She was crying. The tears were rolling down her face, and I wanted to just step in and say stop, we’re done, we’ve heard enough.
But I needed to hear more. I needed to hear all of it.
Silverman said, “But you did get back, didn’t you, Stella?”
The cars blew by along the highway, and she paced, her legs stiff, arms moving in jerky tremors.