Free Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner Page B

maintain, or at least to believe I was maintaining, the semblance of lucidity, especially after months of habituation. I experienced it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration, and I could read or “work” while smoking hash, or at least believed I could, whereas when smoking stronger stuff I could not follow, let alone form, whole sentences. But the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of the drug in one’s experience. If, say, a group of trees that had previously been mere background suddenly stood forth a little and their slender and strictly symmetrical forms became an elegant if unparaphrasable claim about form in general, you could write that observation down without dissolving it in the process, or without the strangeness of your hands distracting you from however you’d planned to use them. If a slight acoustic heightening allowed you to perceive for the first time consciously that the sound of the leaves in the wind was, as it were, in conversation with the similar but ultimately distinct sound of distant traffic on Calle de Alfonso XII, or that a hammering noise was in fact two noises, one issuing from a nearby tree and the other from a construction site beyond the park, and if these realizations inspired some meditation on the passing into one another of the natural and the cultural, the meditation, if not profound, could at least achieve coherence, could be formulated as it was experienced, not retrospectively, after coming down. Many people, I believed, used similar drugs to remove themselves from their experience, but because, for as long as I could remember, I always already felt removed from my experience, I took the drug to intensify the vantage from said remove, and so experienced it as an intensification of presence, but only at my customary distance from myself; maybe, when I panicked, that distance was collapsing.
    That I smoked hash with tobacco was critical during this phase of my project, although I was resolved never to smoke a cigarette again after leaving Spain, and so smoked with particular abandon, critical because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy. Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.
    I didn’t think these things, but might have, as I walked back through the park and home, then lay on my bed, only several feet beneath the downward-sloping ceiling, after having ignited the butane heater and drawn it near me. Once I was warm I would eat something, open a bottle of wine, and then write Cyrus, to whom I’d long since confessed I had internet access in my apartment, and who was in Mexico with his girlfriend and her dog. I was vaguely jealous of them; they’d driven to Mexico in her pickup with little money and no real