Читать книгу Beyond Measure - Rachel Z. Arndt - Страница 12

AWAKE

Inside a spansule of Adderall are tiny beads, and inside each of these is a mix of salts. These salts in spheres in capsules can make a person stay awake. They can also make the restless focused and the focused restless. They give me what I imagine to be a healthy level of alertness, and even when I fall asleep just minutes after taking one, upright on the couch or defeated back in bed, I am glad for them, because it is against this medicine that I measure possibility—of being awake, of being with other people, of being. Because of that measurement, I have something to focus on, always, something to hold my unrelated anxieties. Because of that measurement, I can be sure I’m trying to be productive, and these days, that’s the best you can ask of someone, at least in public.

In the relative private of my friend’s car, driving to Minneapolis along highways flanked by fields both fallow and full, I was getting tired. So I reached into the tiny pants pocket with my pointer and thumb and tweezed out my pocket pill, glanced away from the billboard-free road to look at my friend and make sure she was still reading while I instinctively swished around some spit, and dry-swallowed it. She knew I took the pills, but still, I didn’t want to call attention to it, because she was a new friend, and I was trying to seem “normal,” an effort I air-quoted when I thought it, as if protecting my ego from its own judgment. We were going to Minneapolis to see the Nine Inch Nails, a band I lied about liking because I was trying to make friends in the town I’d moved to a month before.

The pill wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be because it never is when I drive, but I still hope, every time, thinking that maybe I’ll have calibrated everything well enough for the medicine to obviate the Coke Zero or iced coffee I usually drink on long drives, their caffeinated push augmented by the sleep-disabling need to pee. Inevitably, I overdo the caffeination, but it doesn’t become apparent until I arrive and find myself shaking and sweaty as I unpack the car with the manic enthusiasm of someone looking for a misplaced wallet in her own house, tearing through drawers and moving every object because movement feels like a solution.

When we got to Minneapolis, I raced to get everything out of the car and into the place we were staying, the house of my friend’s friends, who were out of town. As my friend punched the code into the digital front door lock, I wondered if I should ask for it, driven by the need to plan and the tendency to always expect the worst. The keys depressed and popped out one by one, each depression triggering the spring-out of the last button. Inside, trying to make my avoidance of the house’s two cats seem like I was restless, not afraid of cats, I worried that I’d taken the pill too early in the day, that it wouldn’t last through the concert, despite the caffeine rushing me unasleep as if through subtraction.