Eyewitnesses to armed robberies make men with guns taller and their voices deeper, so that appearance be congruent with fear inspired. This is also why grown people are surprised to find their fathers small or weak, and to realize that they have always been so.
When talking about heroin, about a particularly good shot, junkies, who are nothing if not generic, angle their glazed eyes and shrunken pupils diagonal towards heaven and in wistful voices, whining nasal smack voices, voices that are phlegmy because they smoke, say, I felt like Jesus. At the crooks of their arms are cut-rate stigmata, which are renewed with a devotion which might indeed be called religious, and they say I could walk on water, but by this they only mean they could drown uncaring, perhaps not even bothering to wave.
Most of us, realizing we have fallen, would like to believe that we were undone by something of particular beauty or evil--that our sickness or pleasure reflected some crucial truth or universal weakness, and that we are therefore martyrs or explorers or canaries in a coal mine, when what we are most like are jumpers trying doors, looking for an unlocked roof.
And so on the other side of the world, in glazed border towns near the meridian where the air is always heavy as blood, sad thin men shooting golden heroin between their brown toes smile as though they too were not doomed. They light Krong Thip cigarettes and put their flip-flops back on. They catch each other's stuttering eyes and say, maaaaan I feel like a Bodhisattva.
