Transcendent Kingdom(38)

    Afterward, I speeded all the way back to the lab. There were often cops patrolling this little patch of road for speeders, but my Stanford Medical School bumper sticker had gotten me out of at least one ticket. The policeman that day had collected my license and registration, all while making small talk.

“What do you study?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your bumper sticker. What kind of doctor are you?”

I didn’t bother correcting him. Instead I said, “I’m a neurosurgeon.”

He whistled and handed me back my things. “You must be real smart,” he said. “You should protect that brain of yours. Go slower next time.”



* * *



—

Han started laughing the second he saw me walk in with the bottles.

“You sure I can’t tempt you?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know what all the fuss is about?”

“You’re pretty weird,” Han said, as though this was just then occurring to him for the first time, and then he shrugged, resigned himself to my strangeness and the experiment. “You know just as well as I do that even after we drink this, we still won’t understand what the fuss is about. We’re not mice. We can’t get addicted to this stuff.”

He was right, of course. I wasn’t expecting to get high from drinking fortified chocolate milk. I wasn’t really expecting anything other than a little fun and, silly as it was, a base point from which I could relate to that limping mouse who had caught my attention.

    I shook the bottle of chocolate and then cracked it open. I gulped down some of it and then handed it to Han, who took a couple of sips.

“Not bad,” he said, and then, seeing the look on my face, “What’s wrong, Gifty?”

I swallowed another sip of Ensure. Han was right. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good either. “My brother was addicted to opioids,” I said. “He died of an overdose.”



* * *



—

The first time I saw Nana high, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. He was slumped down on the couch, his eyes rolled back, a faint smile on his face. I thought he was half asleep, dreaming the sweetest of dreams. Days went by like this, then a week. Finally, I figured it out. No dream could wreak the havoc this wreaked.

It took me a while to gather the courage, but I once asked Nana if he could describe what it felt like when he took the pills or shot up. He was six months into his addiction, two and a half years away from his death. I don’t know what emboldened me to ask a question like that. Up until that point I had exercised a “don’t dare mention it” kind of policy, figuring that if I avoided any talk of drugs or addiction, then the problem would go away on its own. But it wasn’t just that I avoided mentioning Nana’s addiction because I wanted it to go away; it was that it was so ever-present that mentioning it felt ridiculous, redundant. In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.

When I’d asked Nana what it felt like to be high, he had smirked at me a little and rubbed his forehead.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t describe it.”

    “Try.”

“It just feels good.”

“Try harder,” I said. The anger in my voice surprised us both. Nana had already become accustomed to all the yelling and pleading and crying from our mother as she tried to urge him to stop, but I never yelled. I was too scared to be angry, too sad.

Nana couldn’t bring himself to look at me, but when he finally did, I looked away. For years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity. What a waste.

Nana sighed and said, “It feels amazing, like everything inside my head just empties out and then there’s nothing left—in a good way.”





29





My mother had to work the Sunday night after Nana’s accident. The bottle of OxyContin had not yet started to dwindle at a rate faster than it should have, and so we didn’t yet know to worry about anything other than his ankle. She had taken the week off to care for him, until an angry voice mail from her boss sent her back to the Palmer house.

I asked her if she would take me to church on her way to her night shift, and she was so excited to see me wanting to go to church on my own, without her prodding, that she didn’t even seem to mind that it was out of her way.

There weren’t that many people there that evening. I chose a seat in the middle pew and urged myself to stay awake. The worship leader that night was the woman with the warbling voice.

“To hiiiiim whooo siiiiiits onnnnn the thronnnnneeeee,” she sang, her vibrato so strong that it threw her a half step off beat.

I clapped along, fighting the urge to plug my ears until some other soloist got a chance to shine.

After worship, Pastor John went up to the pulpit. He preached from the book of Isaiah, a short, dull sermon that did little to move the few congregants who had decided to get some God in before their workweek. Even Pastor John seemed bored by his own message.

    He cleared his throat and said a quick closing prayer, and then he made the altar call.

“Now, I know someone out there is sitting with a heavy heart. I know someone out there is tired of carrying a cross. And I’m telling you now, you don’t have to leave here the same as when you came in. Amen? God’s got a plan for you. Amen? All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart. He’ll do the rest. Is there anyone who’d like to come down to the altar today? Is there anyone who’d like to give their life to Christ?”