High and Wired

Welcome to the Pharmacy (You're Not on the List)

Let me get one thing straight before we begin: I am not a drug dealer. I am a creative taxpayer who happens to have a chemistry problem. There is a difference, and the difference is worth approximately four hundred million dollars, give or take a yacht and a very good lawyer.

My name doesn't matter. What matters is the molecule. I have spent the better part of two decades watching substances move through economies whose only job is to move substances through other economies whose only job is to own a patent no one has read, while the people who write the schedules still want a wet signature on a form designed in 1970. I have access to compounds that your doctor cannot pronounce, and I pay less in taxes than my housekeeper, and my housekeeper is a wonderful woman named Rosa who deserves every penny and then some.

I am writing this book for three reasons. They are not a list I keep in a drawer for other lives. They are this life.

The Sideboard, the Letters, and a Woman Who Dusts Around Them

It is a Tuesday. It is almost always a Tuesday when I remember that I live in a house and not in a filing cabinet.

Rosa comes on Tuesdays. She has a key I did not give her in a ceremony. She has a rag that used to be a pillowcase. She has a bottle of something lemon that I do not buy and that the grocery delivers because she put it on a list in a handwriting that is better than mine. The label has a cartoon sun wearing sunglasses. I have never asked her why. The sun looks like it knows about the letters and has decided not to care, which is a better attitude than mine and a cheaper one. She starts at the sideboard because the sideboard is where I leave the things I am pretending are not important.

The sideboard is mahogany and slightly too large for the room, which is how you know it was purchased by a person who thought furniture was a kind of argument. On it: a wooden bowl from a country I can still visit, a lamp that makes everyone look richer, and two envelopes that are not in a safe. They sit under the bowl, slightly fanned, the way a person leaves cards when he was in a hurry and then was not. I will tell you what they said once, at the end, where endings go.

Rosa lifts the bowl. She dusts the wood. She sets the bowl back. She does not stack the letters. She does not square them. She leaves them the way she found them. Once, in the first month, she asked if I wanted them in a drawer. I said no. A drawer is where you put things you have decided about. The sideboard is where you put things the government already forgot and you have not.

"You want the good coffee," she says. It is not a question. There is a cheap coffee I deserve and a good coffee I take. I take the good coffee. I am not a hero for taking it. Once a year she asks what I actually do. I tell her I consult. She says, "On what?" I say, "On not answering that question." She laughs, which is generous. The laugh is the part of this book I cannot depreciate. I could give her a better line. I have better lines for men in polos. I do not use them on Tuesdays. Tuesdays are for the cheap joke that is also the truth. She has a sister who works at a clinic. She has a son who is better at school than I was at anything that did not involve a signature. She pays sales tax on the things a house requires. I paid less than she did in a year I will not name, and I am writing that sentence on purpose, because it is the only sentence in this introduction that is not about my boredom.