12.23 Morphine Moment - Forest Primeval

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23. Morphine Moment on Forest Bench

Ali stretches out for her morphine repose on the bench in the Glenn faintly and quaintly lit by her candles.

   The bench feels hard against her skin & bones but not enough to prevent relaxing.
   Reaching in pocket, she pulls out a prepared syringe and, pulling off its needle-guard and loosening & pulling down her Levi pants, she pushes the needle into her right thigh, depresses the syringe plunger, injecting the morphine solution, pulls out the needle and lays the used syringe on the table.
   Now she awaits effect.

   She imagines the morphine molecules, having entered the small veins around injection site, being carried in seconds to right side of heart and into lungs where each morphine molecule is awarded an oxygen atom to energize its effect; and then the energized morphine passes back to left side of heart and up aorta and through her neck's carotid arteries - right and left -  to her brain's neurons, where each molecule seeks out a minor paranoia protein and neutralizes it.

   What Ali means by minor paranoia are the worries of life - getting sick and dying, losing money and possessions, being threatened by the tax authority, by bad guys. Generally, the sufferings from bad decisions. These are the thoughts that stop happiness, the worries that may be temporarily relieved by alcohol or by orgasm or by good eating or perfect friendship on a moonlit night.

   Ali on her back on the bench looking up through the faintly candle-lit night sees the starry sky between overhead tree branches. Shortly she forgets the hard bench. She thinks niceties like It's a nice place … a nice bench … a nicest of all places. Her psychological time slows, so one second seems like 10 seconds, and at that rate she feels she has time to do all she wishes and still be within the same moment as when she started – a feeling that fills the morphine-dosed person with patience and allows time her to do what she desires.

   What Ali is doing is a session. It may last up to 30 minutes. She excludes day-dreaming and grandiose thinking; she sticks to practicality. For example, she starts by locating self in today's day & date, the time by illuminated wrist watch, 01:01AM, on bench in North Bronx.
   She thinks: What shall I do in next hour? What practical problems must I face in the next 24 hours, and solve? What are my options? What shall I read or do, drink and eat next? After the immediate future is dealt with, she turns to the coming week and month.
    She sits up stretching and feeling the morphine pleasure in her muscles. “Now I am re'd' for Fred’” she says, abbreviating Ready for Freddy. She plans to read. The morphine makes reading efficient and ecstatic.

She means to establish a rhythm to her nightly outing. It starts with the morphine repose. She is feeling, as she likes to say, “bright-eyed, but, I hope, not bushy-tailed” and goes back to her sack and pulls out the sweet Concord grape wine from Dan's kitchen. For healthy reason – Ali is a health freek (the spelling altered for altered meaning) – she dilutes the 10% alcohol wine to 5% with water. She is also a numbers freek – everything measured – so she has brought an Erlenmeyer flask and by candle light she measures out 125-ml wine and makes up the rest with water.
   Now she is ready for her first read (the noun, said like reed) with the wine. Tonight she has Huckleberry Finn from Dan's library Mark Twain set in a gray hardcover book. She reads in a relaxed way, taking one sip of wine for one page reading and contemplating Twain's words, or as she says “Almost eating them for the pleasure.” It is the chapter where Huck, who has run away with the Negro slave, Jim, is visiting the wise widow Judith, and Huck is in a skirt, masquerading as a girl, but Judith suspects he is really a boy and tests it by throwing an object onto Huck's dress-covered lap. Instead of spreading thighs as any girl in a dress would do to catch the object, Huck claps his knees together, as all boys with trousers do.  He sure is a boy! Judith thinks.

   Brilliant deduction, muses Ali. And then she reads another of Judith's gender-test wisdoms "You might fool a man, but you make a pretty awful girl. Poor child, when you start to thread a needle, don't hold the thread still and bring the needle up to it. Instead, hold the needle still and poke the thread through it—that's the way women usually do it, but men do it the other way." 
   Ali continues to read happily, shifting to a later chapter where Twain inserts Tom Sawyer, a hero from another book and, as Ali reads Tom's breezy chatter, she thinks: Twain made a mistake to insert the frivolous, artificial Tom into the down-to-earth Huck's story. But I guess the reading public wanted a reprise of his popular hero.

Thirty minutes later, she finishes the wine. She drinks the wine to start, on empty stomach, so as to get the best alcohol effect. Next she opens Nicola's package of spaghetti & sauce and as she opens her salad jar by unscrewing its top cover, she says loudly, “Time for a second read.”  Out here in the wilderness after midnight, one can talk out loud to oneself and there's no one else to hear. 
   The second read is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, the novel about Miss Lilly Bart, a tragic heroine caught between her corrupted needs for aristocratic splendor and her real position as poor relation of her disapproving Aunt Julia, on the verge of being overtaken by a more savvy cousin in the competition for Julia's death money.
   As Ali reads, she slowly eats, using chopsticks to eat one spaghetti cylinder or a piece of the salad at a time for each half page read. She paces herself by eating or drinking according to a time rate based on her read speed.
   Now she is reading the segment where Lily shines as hostess and her admirer who is the narrator appreciates a possibly final view of the fast-going-to-seed, 29-year-old Lily in top form.   
   “Wow!” thinks Ali, savoring a spaghetti in mouth, “I don't have the life experience to appreciate this scene but maybe years from now I shall understand what it is to be in one's prime, to be at a particular peak, to pitch a double-header and not give a hit. This must be it.”

   Now, Ali's appetite is up and she needs to put more in mouth than one spaghetti so, still pacing her eating, she wraps a bunch of spaghetti's and some salad in her chopsticks, puts it in her mouth and turns to the flavorful garlic roll. The morphine in her improves the taste of the food, and she finds herself at an almost ecstatic peak of eating – a Pikes Peak, a view from the bridge, a peak at Darien – she thinks and adds – “even as you and I” a phrase she's seen written as prologue to a re-run movie Dan had taken her to, from an Edgar Wallace story,  Born to Gamble.

   She looks up at the Moon and puts her book aside, then lies down again, and allows herself to drift into lightest sleep, thinking, I am in the best possible place doing the best things in the best way. 

   For next, click 12.24: A Walk on the Wilderness Side