White Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

though.”
    Henry didn’t have a watch. In fact his whole left arm was missing. He kept his time down deep in his veins, and he was right. It was time to go.
    It was always time to go at Dom’s. We had just stopped starting to sit down, and now it was already time to start standing up. We were always on the move. It might not have looked like it. Dom’s mouth hung open and his eyes were closed and his penis was flopping loose out his pants. But deep down he was moving. He was on top of things. There was never a single second to spare, never an instant to relax.
    This fact might surprise a casual visitor. At any given moment, the house was full of people with their eyes closed and their mouths open. On chairs, under chairs, on the floor, on the toilet.
    But after a while you realized everyone was moving. Just very, very slowly. They were starting to get up or starting to get down. There was never a moment of real rest. That’s why everyone was so bone tired. Everyone was always moving. It just didn’t always look that way. From the perspective of a rabbit, a turtle looks like it’s sitting still. Take some of these joyriders. Lawyers coming through the door to buy some Oxys. Looking at their watches, on the way to some meeting.
    Those lawyers came in looking for quick-stop service and what they found looked like a motionless swamp. Like Mississippi or Mexico. You pull up at the gas station and there’s one old lady asleep in a chair under a shitty third-world tree. You go inside and the cashier is asleep on his folded arms. A ten-year-old boy is dozing on the step. An ant is crawling across his lips. A slow-crawling ant.
    These lawyer types are impatient, always in a hurry. They paid top dollar for the damn pills and they expected service. They opened the door and Dom was on the floor. As their eyes adjusted to the no-light they could see he was slowly moving, like spilled oil.
    “Um, Dom, I really must get going. I called ahead. Please if you could just, maybe, hurry. Let me help you with that, I can get that for you.”
    “Let me just get my…my…”
    “Your keys, Dom, they’re right here on the floor. Here they are, take them.” They were always finishing his sentences for him.
    “…my gun.” Because the turtle wins the race. The turtle wins in the end. The rabbit moves fast, but he only moves for eight or ten hours a day. But the turtle is always moving. Plus the dope-body makes new kinds of time. Secret hours inside the hours. Dom’s green, leather neck. His deep-sea metabolism. Always moving.
    That day, it took us two hours or so to come in, to get down and get the drugs in, and then to get up and go out on another run. If you filmed all that, and then played it back fast, you’d see. Like they do on the Discovery Channel when they show you the seasons changing on the savanna. All the endless gray and green matter you think of as still, is actually always moving. Even the trees. Even the mountains.
    You’d see us move like that, slowly sitting down and slowly standing back up. But I bet you’d never see us sitting completely still. What the hell is there to sit still for? You think these drugs are free?
    We moved slow on purpose. One time Dom lit a firecracker under dozing Henry’s chair and Henry fell off so quick he blurred. Fast was no problem for us. We moved slow for conservation.
    To conserve the precious drops of dope inside us we moved slowly. Like you move a full glass of water slowly so you don’t spill it. Moving fast spills the dope, it speeds up the metabolism. The idiot heart chews up those twenty-dollar vials faster and faster. Maybe there was a little bit of brain damage too.
    I never thought of myself as slow. In fact, all I thought about was getting some rest, just a little time to rest.
    OK, I guess I could tell I wasn’t exactly Speedy Gonzalez. Sometimes the same view of floor or wall would lodge in my brain like a shard of glass. Then I knew I hadn’t moved in a while. Maybe