I took a fourth breath, which involved the lighter again. The smoke was gray and thick and instantly satisfying. I could feel the roots of my hair growing. The follicles were thrashing with microscopic activity. I could hear my neighbors getting ready for work. Stark and absolute clarity everywhere. My spine felt like steel, warm and straight and unbending, with brain commands rushing up and down its mysterious tubular interior, fast, precise, logical, targeted.

I was functioning.

Functioning just fine.

A fourth hit, and a fifth. There was a lot of weed in the bowl. I had packed it pretty tight. A homecoming treat, remember? That had been the intention. Not really a wake-and-bake. But it was there.

So I smoked it.

I felt good in the car. How could I not? I was ready to beat the world. And capable of it. The traffic seemed to get out of the way, and all the lights were green. Whatever it takes, baby. A guy should always max himself up to the peak of his capabilities. He shortchanges himself any other way. He owes himself and the world his best face, and how he gets it is his own business.

They took me in through a private door, because the public lobby was a zoo. My heels tapped on the tile, fast and rhythmic and authoritative. I was standing straight and my shoulders were back. They made me wait in a room. I could hear the crowd through the door. A low, tense buzz. They were all waiting for my entrance. Hundreds of eyes, waiting to move my way.

“Time,” someone said.

I pushed open the door into the well of the court. I saw the lawyers, and the spectators, and the jury pool. I saw the defendant at his table. The fat guy in the uniform called out, “All rise!”

J

OYCE

C

AROL

O

ATES

is the author most recently of the novels

Mud-woman

and

Daddy Love

, and the story collections

Black Dahlia

&

White Rose

and

The Corn Maiden

&

Other Stories

. She has appeared in a number of mystery/suspense anthologies, including

The Best American Mystery Stories of the 20th Century

and

The Dark End of the Street

edited by Jonathan Santlofer and S.J. Rozan. Her next novel is the Gothic mystery

The Accursed

. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Medal in the Humanities.

high

by joyce carol oates

How much? she was asking.

For she knew: she was being exploited.

Her age. Her naïveté. Her uneasiness. Her good tasteful expensive clothes. Her hat.

Over her shimmering silver hair, a black cloche cashmere hat.

And it was the wrong part of town. For a woman like her.

How much? she asked, and when she was told she understood that yes, she was being exploited. No other customers on this rainy weekday night in the vicinity of the boarded-up train depot would pay so much. She was being laughed at. She was being eyed. She was being assessed. It was being gauged of her—Could we take all her money, could we take her car keys and her car, would she dare to report us? Rich bitch.

She knew. She suspected. She was very frightened but she was very excited. She thought, I am the person who is here, this must be me. I can do this.

She paid. Never any doubt but that the silver-haired lady would pay.

And politely she said, for it was her nature to speak in such a way, after any transaction, Thank you so much!

Self-medicating, you might call it.

Though she hated the weakness implied in such a term—medicating!

She wasn’t desperate. She wasn’t a careless, reckless, or stupid woman. If she had a weakness it was being suffused with hope.

I need to save myself. I don’t want to die.

Her hair! Her hair had turned, not overnight, but over a period of several distraught months, a luminous silver that, falling to her shoulders, parted in the center of her head, caused strangers to stare after her.

Ever more beautiful she was becoming. Elegant, ethereal.

After his death she’d lost more than twenty pounds.

His death she carried with her. For it was precious to her. Yet awkward like an oversized package in her arms she dared not set down anywhere.

Almost, you could see it—the bulky thing in her arms.

Almost, you wanted to flee from her—the bulky thing in her arms was a terrible sight.

I will do this, she said. I will begin.

She’d never been “high” in her life. She’d never smoked marijuana—which her classmates had called pot, grass, dope. She’d been a good girl. She’d been a cautious girl. She’d been a reliable girl. In school she’d had many friends—the safe sort of friends. They hadn’t been careless, reckless, or stupid, and they’d impressed their influential elders. They’d never gotten high and they had passed into adulthood successfully and now it was their time to begin passing away.

She thought, I will get high now. It will save me.

The first time, she hadn’t needed to leave her house. Her sister’s younger daughter Kelsey came over with another girl and an older boy of about twenty, bony-faced, named Triste (Agnes thought this was the name: “Triste”), who’d provided the marijuana.

Like this, they said. Hold the joint like this, inhale slowly, don’t exhale too fast, keep it in.

They were edgy, loud-laughing. She had to suppose they were laughing at her.

But not mean-laughing. She didn’t think so.

Just, the situation was funny. Kids their age, kids who smoked dope, weren’t in school and weren’t obsessing about the future, to them the lives of their elders just naturally seemed funny.

Kelsey wasn’t Agnes’s favorite niece. But the others—nieces, nephews—were away at college, or working.

Kelsey was the one who hadn’t gone to college. Kelsey was the one who’d been in rehab for something much stronger than marijuana—OxyContin, maybe. And the girl’s friends had been arrested for drug possession. Her sister had said, Kelsey has broken my heart. But I can’t let her know.

Agnes wasn’t thinking of this. Agnes was thinking, I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive.

Whatever the transaction was, how much the dope had actually cost, Agnes was paying, handing over bills to Triste who grunted, shoving them into his pocket. Agnes was feeling grateful, generous. Thinking how long it had been since young people had been in her house, how long even before her husband had died, how long since voices had been raised like this and she’d heard laughter.

They’d seemed already high, entering her house. And soon there came another, older boy, in his mid-twenties perhaps, with a quasi-beard on his jutting jaw, in black T-shirt, much-laundered jeans, biker boots, forearms covered in lurid tattoos.

“Hi there, Aggie. How’s it goin’!”

Agnes, she explained. Her name was Agnes.

The boy stared at her. Not a boy but a man in his early thirties, in the costume of a boy. Slowly he smiled as if she’d said something witty. He’d pulled into her driveway in a rattly pickup.

“Ag-nez. Cool.”

They’d told him about her, maybe. They felt sorry for her and were protective of her.

Her shoulder-length silvery hair, her soft-spoken manner. The expensive house, like something in a glossy magazine. That she was Kelsey’s actual aunt, and a widow.

The acquisition of a “controlled substance”—other than prescription drugs—was a mystery to Agnes, though she understood that countless individuals, of all ages but primarily young, acquired these substances easily: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, Oxy-Contin, Vicodin, even heroin and “meth.” Self-medicating had become nearly as common as aspirin. Recreational drugs began in middle school.