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“You a journalist?”
“No. I’m a writer. That’s why I’m here.”
“What books did you write?”
“None yet. First I need to do some research.”
The other man looked at the money on the floor and then again at Paulo, doubting that a person so young could be writing something—unless it was for the newspapers that were part of the “Invisible Post.” He reached for the money, but Paulo stopped him.
“Just five minutes. Not more than five minutes.”
The oldish young man agreed—no one had ever paid a cent for his time ever since he threw away a promising career as an executive at a multinational bank, ever since he tried the “kiss of the needle” for the first time.
The kiss of the needle?
“That’s right. We prick ourselves a few times before injecting the heroin because what everyone else calls pain is our prelude to finding something all of you will never understand.”
They were whispering so as not to draw the attention of others, but Paulo knew that even if an atomic bomb dropped on the place none of the people there would go to the trouble of fleeing.
“You can’t use my name.”
The other man had begun to open up, and five minutes passed quickly. Paulo could sense the devil’s presence in that house.
“And then what? What’s it feel like?”
“And then I can’t describe it—you only know by trying it. Or believing what Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground said about it.”
Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Paulo had listened to Lou Reed before. That wasn’t gonna cut it.
“Please, try to describe it. Our five minutes are going fast.”
The man before him took a deep breath. He kept one eye on Paulo and the other on his syringe. He should respond quickly and get rid of the impertinent “writer” before he got kicked out of the house, taking the money with him.
“I’m guessing you have some experience with drugs. I’m familiar with the effects of hashish and marijuana: peace and euphoria, self-confidence, an urge to eat and make love. I don’t care about any of these, they’re things from a kind of life we’ve been taught to live. You smoke hash and think: ‘The world is a beautiful place, I’m finally paying attention,’ but depending on the dose, you end up on a trip that takes you straight to hell. You take LSD and think: Good god, how didn’t I notice that before, the earth breathes and its colors are constantly changing? Is that what you want to know?”
That’s what he wanted to know. But he waited for the oldish young man to continue his story.
“With heroin, it’s completely different: you’re in control of everything—your body, your mind, your art. An immense, indescribable happiness washes over the entire universe. Christ on earth. Krishna in your veins. Buddha smiling down on you from heaven. No hallucinations, this is reality, true reality. Do you believe me?”
Paulo didn’t. But he didn’t say anything, merely nodded.
“The next day, there’s no hangover, just the feeling that you’ve been to paradise and come back to this crappy world. Then you go to work and it hits you that everything is a lie, people trying to justify their lives, look important, creating obstacles because it gives them a sense of authority, of power. You can’t stand all the hypocrisy anymore and decide to go back to paradise, but paradise is expensive, the gate is narrow. Whoever visits discovers that life is beautiful, that the sun can in fact be divided into rays, it’s no longer that boring, round ball you can’t even look at. The next day, you go back to work on a train full of people with empty looks, emptier than the looks of the people here. Everybody thinking about getting home, making dinner, turning on the television, escaping reality—man, reality is this white powder, not the television!”
The longer the oldish young man spoke, the more Paulo felt like trying it at least one time, just this once. The figure before him knew this.
“With hashish, I know there’s a world there that I don’t belong to. The same with LSD. But heroin, man, heroin’s my thing. It’s what makes life worth living, no matter what the people outside say. There’s just one problem…”
Finally—a problem. Paulo needed to hear about this problem right away, because he was a few inches from the tip of a needle and his first experience with heroin.
“The problem is your body builds up a tolerance. At first, I was spending five dollars a day; today it takes twenty dollars to get to paradise. I already sold everything I had—my next step is to beg on the streets; after begging I’ll have to steal, because the devil doesn’t like people who’ve been to paradise. I know what’s going to happen, because it’s happened to everyone you see here today. But I don’t care.”
How strange. Everyone had a different idea about which side the gate to paradise was to be found on.
“I think the five minutes are up.”
