Narcopolis

Dimple’s new life at Safer was governed by the clock. They gave her a complete medical at Holy Family Hospital. The hole in her chin was not dangerous, the doctors told her, at least not at the moment. It was better to wait and see what happened, but first she had to detox. The staff at Safer put her on chlorpromazine, available on the street under the brand name of Largactil, and it was months later that she discovered how controversial the drug was, and dangerous, because it was still experimental. But she did what she was told, she took the pills they gave her and tried to live through detox. The chlorpromazine made her hallucinate so heavily that she wasn’t aware of the torment her body was enduring, the pain, the panic and diarrhoea, because she was tripping. Four or five days after she started on the drug, when the worst of the withdrawals had passed, they took her off it. For two weeks her bowels were loose and for a month she didn’t sleep, not at all, she lay awake on the turkey mattress and waited for dawn. The centre was on the top floor of the church premises and from the roof she heard the birds at four in the morning. Then the sky lightened and the others woke and the day began. At six there was a yoga class. All turkeys had to attend, one of the other inmates told her; it was compulsory. Yoga was followed by breakfast: two fried eggs, two pieces of toast, jam, butter and milk tea. Then the morning’s physical therapy session began, an hour and a half of sweeping and swabbing. Once a week they swept out the church in which the centre was located, Mount Carmel’s, where the yearly Feast of Our Lady of Infinite Sorrow was held. Afterwards, the turkeys showered, or most of them did. The new turkeys who couldn’t stand the touch of water went straight into the morning meeting. There were two house meetings a day, run by those inmates who’d been sober longest. At her first meeting, the guy who was in charge, an older Catholic fellow named Carl, asked her a question. She was still feeling the effects of the chlorpromazine, which made it difficult to lie. The only lie she could keep straight in her head was the lie of her name and gender. So when Carl said, Why do you take drugs? she told him what she thought, told him the truth because the least such a question deserved was a real answer. She said, Oh, who knows, there are so many good reasons and nobody mentions them and the main thing nobody mentions is the comfort of it, how good it is to be a slave to something, the regularity and the habit of addiction, the fact that it’s an antidote to loneliness, and the way it becomes your family, gives you mother love and protection and keeps you safe. Carl, trying to keep to the moral high ground, trying to protect his position as the meeting’s architect, said: But there are good habits and there are bad habits. Drugs are a bad habit, so why do it? Because, said Dimple, it isn’t the heroin that we’re addicted to, it’s the drama of the life, the chaos of it, that’s the real addiction and we never get over it; and because, when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best of the limited options we are offered — why would we choose anything else? When she looked up she found Carl gazing at her with narrowed eyes, and when he asked her to continue, in a tone of voice that suggested animosity or at least reluctance, she said she was feeling sick and she had nothing more to say.

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