It started off pretty well in Mexico City. Helen, who I’d met in Barcelona, had put me in contact with a language school here, and my Skype interview had been so easy that I thought it was a hoax. They offered me the job at the end of the call, started on the visa process, helped me work out flights, and passed on the address of a place where teachers pitched up for a couple of weeks until they found an apartment of their own.

Going through customs, I imagined the pale coils of my insides showing up on the X-ray screen. I had about two hundred dollars and two hundred words of Spanish. I bought a doughnut and sat in Arrivals for a while with my hangover. Finally, steeled up enough to get in a car, I went to the taxi kiosk and handed them the address.

On the street where the taxi left me, there were plants everywhere, bursting up through the gaps in people’s walls: monstera, teléfono, begonias, orchids, bird-of-paradise flowers, banana leaves, alcatraces, and an enormous palm swaying like the mast of a ship. When I got out of the taxi into the Sunday-morning rain and thanked the driver, my voice and body were shaking. The pores of the concrete in the pavement were plugged green with algae. There was a seethe in the air, a cool feeling, heavy on the skin of my forearms. I felt like I was hearing growth.

I dumped my things and drank all day in the dim cave of a taquería, watching the park drip, breathing in the smell. At night I watched football and felt like I had found a thread joining the first time I had seen photos of this place, in my grandfather’s encyclopaedia in 1998, when I was nine, and the circumstances in which I’d wound up here. The word archive comes from a word in Greek that can mean ‘father’s house’. My little personal archive had pictures and feelings that came directly from my mother’s father’s house, and now, thousands of miles away from where I’d begun, I was going deeper into them. There was no escape from home. Maybe that wasn’t altogether a bad thing, I thought, if I could just hold the pictures steady, contemplate them, not try to make them part of some big story-loop sucking me off to some other place.

 

It was good to have a job, and not to be putting three-quarters of my income into rent, like a lot of my peers in Dublin were. I found an apartment in a pink ’70s building that didn’t shake in earthquakes. My working days were long, starting at 4 a.m. to beat the traffic, with the last class of the day sometimes at 8 or 9 in the evening. But that makes it sound harder than it was. I’d start on the drink early, before getting out of bed but after getting sick. Once I’d had a couple of shower beers or some of whatever bottle I’d left cooling in the cistern, I’d be numb enough to feel almost energized.

My students were executives who were too tired to show up – in mind, almost always: in body, not infrequently – or long-term unemployed people who’d mostly just be tapping away on their phones or laptops, firing off CVs, trawling LinkedIn, uttering polite chuckles at my shite jokes to give the impression they were listening. The certificate might help burnish their CVs, I supposed, or else it just kept their parents off their backs. I didn’t feel very bad about this. I wasn’t too present either, and I’d get paid whether the students were there or not. After the early class, I’d sway on my Starbucks chair, under a caul of green banana leaves and palm trees, sucking down vanilla cream cold brew that I loaded with the contents of a hip-flask, my legs tingling from the walk along Reforma, past statues that looked like blast debris fallen from the rest of the world: a Tito; a Gandhi; a map of Armenia intended to commemorate the genocide. Gaggles of out-of-town schoolkids would stream across the pedestrian crossing towards the Museo de Antropología, dozy, up too early. I’d wait for the cold brew to leak into the air, the frost-taste in it taking me back to the release of morning break in school, that sort of crackling instant between opening a can of something ice-cold and fizzy and the taste of it in your mouth.

Managing within that sleepy, still-hovering feel of morning was easy. What never went so well was the hot noon glare, when the hangover really began to rage. My morning classes tended to be close to the school. Afternoons would send me way north to the industrial sector, up around Vallejo and Martín Carranza, horizons dogtoothed with refineries and the sloping roofs of warehouses. I’d slog up there on the Metro or MetroBus, through neighbourhoods whose quake-wrecked churches and pavements rucked up by plane trees looked as fucked as I felt. Sliding off the bus, I’d fall straight into the sort of wood-panelled bar that opened at six in the morning and had piss-gutters that I could never tell if you were allowed to use or not. I found my kind there, men and women carefully lifting the day’s first drink like they were rescuing a bird who’d slammed into a window, their bafflement burning into clarity, even garrulousness, within the space of a few sips. I’d go into the classes with my skull ringing, but with enough beery goodwill to be an encouraging, forgiving teacher. The students here were a bit more committed, getting their classes through the HR departments of their companies. Some of them still message me on my birthday.

Evenings, it nearly all felt worth it. After the last class, which was usually back towards the corporate centre, I’d go trekking home through the ashlight, or kill time in another cantina till the Metro emptied. The drink and the exhaustion felt close enough to happiness as made no difference. The nearer home, the worse the panic became. The city became one big stone dictionary shouting its words all at once. There was nothing I could do except hold the plates of my skull together with my hands. Soon this wouldn’t matter, I’d tell myself, thinking of the baggie, the foil, the lighter and the toilet-roll tube standing on the plastic table under honeyed light. Finally the bus brakes would hiss and I’d half fall out the door, drag myself the last couple of blocks home. It felt nearly religious in its seriousness, the night ritual, and I loved those hours.

Obtaining the stuff was a more vexed proposition than it had been in Barcelona: late-night biweekly trips through the market cages out the back of Tacubaya Metro, along a walkway of planks, as far as a grille with a screen of smoky glass behind it. A hand would come out for the money, vanish, and return with the bag. No change was given. Looking up was a bad idea: the muzzles of assault rifles would be looking back down at you from the level above. Beyond the shoulders of the lads with the guns were the folded tarps and baled-up blankets and phone-charger cables and teddies in nets and all the rest of what got sold there by day. I was able to pay the equivalent of under twenty euros for a habit that would have cost me four times that back in Barcelona. I’d put on all of the music which had once filled my teenage bones with a buzz that I’d mistaken for hope – U2, the Eagles, Pink Floyd, Rory Gallagher, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones – and which I now find terribly silly and dated, and I’d sink back into the ancient couch whose springs were so pummelled by years of tenants that it felt like a liquid hug. The day was about getting to this place and this place only, the only nowhere available, whatever bundle of memories and anxieties that went by my name scattered to atoms.

Weekends when I didn’t have plans, I’d shoot up and lie there until my body felt as huge and cool as a cathedral inside, until the world’s hugest guitar riff seemed to be lifting in my lungs, until my interiority was stitched together exclusively from remembered video games, ads, and the cool bits of stupid films. As long as I could get to that point I had everything figured out. Everyone else was an idiot for not getting that it was all as simple as all that, at the level of particle physics.

Not all the using was solo: just most of it. Socially, it’s fair to say that I fell in with a bad crowd, party people with the same surnames as presidents and ’80s drug lords. I was oblivious to this at the beginning, but then I brought a journalist friend of mine to the art gallery where we’d have most of our parties, and he returned from his round of the room looking concerned.

—That guy over there, he said, pointing discreetly, his hand around his glass. He’s one of the Caro Quintero cousins.

—That guy? He’s a vet.

—He’s more than that, my friend said. You know, I’m not sure about this old party. I feel a bit gamekeeper turned poacher.

—Consider it research.

—I’m not an anthropologist.

—Tonight, we are all anthropologists.

—If only I was a different kind of journalist.

I think this was the party where I woke up shivering on a couch beside my friend Angela, still in our too-thin party clothes, a din from the caged luxury dogs echoing around us in the room where we’d passed out. The glass table was scored with gritty lines of bluish powder.

—What the fuck, said Angela, sitting slowly up, making eye-contact with a miniature poodle flinging herself in little somersaults against the metal of the cage.

—Whose house is this, I said.

—That vet guy’s, she said.

—Oh. I felt very awake all of a sudden. Do you want to get breakfast?

Angela looked around the room. I followed her gaze with mine, saw a pallet loaded with Nike shoeboxes, all wrapped in plastic.

—I think that’d be a good idea, yeah, she said.

The key was in the door. We let ourselves out quietly. I wasn’t sure what street we were going to step out on. The sun punched me in the face. When my vision cleared I was looking at a bunch of enormous papier-mâché skulls in bright colours – lime-green, pink, toothache orange – interspersed with tall dragons and insects and skeletal birds of the same neon colours, all seeming to move and flow down the pedestrianized spine of the avenue, under eucalyptus trees whose arcing shapes made me think of nymphs, or dancers.

—Oh, I know where we are, Angela said, and grabbed me by the arm. I know a place.

—Are those all definitely there? I said, hanging back a little, pointing my cigarette at the parade of animals walking down the middle of the street.

—Definitely, Angela said, but it was a minute or two more before my head stopped swimming and I could feel reassured.

Waking up felt like Russian roulette in those days. I woke up on floors gritty with broken glass and dust in postcodes that I’d had no idea existed. I woke up on the floor of a cantina moments after passing out and slipping from my chair, surrounded by a lake of vomit, the noise of the other drinkers’ applause echoing around the room. I woke up in courtyards surrounded by plastic tables whose surfaces were covered in sticky rings and toppled red cups like the ones you see in American high school films. On a holiday to Chiapas I woke up in a cemetery, lying right on a grave, deep in grass, a plastic bottle of pox in my fist, while people walking to Mass at the little church shook their heads at me. Later, on assignment for a newspaper, writing about refugees fleeing violence in Central America, I woke up at the foot of a golf-cart on an island in Belize, a six-pack of Guinness and pizza with some weed crumbled onto it sitting on the driver’s seat, Steely Dan playing on my phone. I woke up in parks, under trees. I woke up on the lawn of some kind of cultural centre, the two suited security guards ushering me across the grass with the beaming obsequiousness of butlers. I woke up with sand in my pockets on a beach in Acapulco after someone decided it would be cool for us to drive there because we were too high to sleep. I woke up in someone else’s car wearing my swimming trunks and her V-neck sweater, the owner asleep in the back, she and I both soaked, a bare tree looming over the car, its branches fucked by disease, growing in a wild, spherical tangle that I felt convinced for a moment was a nervous system trying to beam some kind of terrible information at me. Two tired-looking men in paint-spattered builders’ overalls were sitting on the step across from the car, eating sandwiches. They stopped chewing when they saw me whirl around to stare at them through the passenger window. When I checked my reflection in the rear-view mirror I could see why they were startled. I woke up on the couch of a studio, gasped, sat up, belt jangling, shirt open, groping towards the bathroom, only to walk through the door of a boardroom where a meeting was in session. Sometimes when I woke I wasn’t even sure if I had come round: it seemed possible that I was just moving down the helix of some kind of after-death hallucination. When I woke up alone in my room I’d groan with relief, pull the shades down, put in earplugs, put on the football – Europa League, Serie A, Brazilian provincial league – and feel the slow cool drip of the live feed connecting me like an umbilical cord with something beyond the cat-piss tang of my own sweat and the tea-dark gloom of my apartment, drinking until I felt like a koi at the bottom of a pond.

What woke me most mornings was a sudden crump of pain in my bladder: that was usually how I knew I was coming down. I’d barely make it to the toilet in time, either shivering or shaking: I couldn’t tell the difference. I was eating so badly that my weight had dropped to around forty-five kilos, which meant I was freezing all the time. I treated food like medication, microwaving a chunk of some frozen soy-meat and wolfing it down standing up, often right by the toilet in case I vomited. My gums softened and rotted until they had the mushy pink feel of papaya on the turn. Now I find it hard to imagine what kind of person would have had sex with me in that state, but they did, a lot, and I was usually the one who cheated, and who told people to fuck off for being too affectionate, blaming my leprous feet and their toe-gaps all pocked with needle scabs on bedbugs that my apartment did not have.

I remember trying to put together more than two days not high or drunk by going on a silent meditation retreat in the mountains outside Oaxaca. Without drugs or alcohol, the present came at me as an explosion of splinters. Every sensory datum felt like it was telling me something. I had to write everything down, but that wasn’t allowed on the retreat, so I started to transcribe everything I was looking at in my head, running my mind again and again over the imagined paragraphs. Between sessions I’d stand on the balcony of the dormitory gripping the rail until my knuckles whitened, rocking myself back and forth. The beauty of the place rained down on me unfelt: the figures shirring past on the dust tracks, wheels trailing thin manes of dust; the ruck of the Sierra Madre going blue in the dusk. The site was as wrecked as I felt: sagging brick arches, grass and nopal cactus sprouting up through the gaps. I itched on my mat for hours and hours. Listening to the tapes they played in the evening to explain more about the technique, my head would start riffing on the only words I could understand, pulling me further and further out of the place. Memories circled like sharp debris caught in an eddy: my unpublished novel, the notebooks gathering coffee-splats and sandwich-leaks in the bins where they’d wound up, the self I’d been a ghost lost in the gaps between the tangle of letters. When the bell went I’d exit the chamber in a sulk, go stand in front of the colonnade of maguey cactuses, wish I could be them. They were time’s most basic signature: slender at the midsection during decades of thirst, edges a rust-stitch of spines, their bases hardened to stone-coloured wood, the freshest portions looking like the heads of sleeping lizards. That bit of Rocky came back to me where they razor his eyebrow to release pressure, the commentator shouting ‘He just wants the bell!’ I did, too: the bell that ended every session, I’d count down to it one breath at a time. I felt like I was learning something about myself: specifically, that I was really difficult to be around.

Within half an hour of getting out I was drunk again. The cantina was showing Breaking Bad, the episode where Walt strangles Krazy-8 with a bike lock. The barman stared listlessly up at the screen, munching peanuts. Me, I was crying, because the guy being strangled was stabbing away with a long shard from a broken plate, the motion of his arm automatic, cold, robotic, not stopping even when he was choking with a noise like he was gargling ceramic chips. The motion of my arm lifting the bottle and the glass to my mouth and putting it back down was the same as the guy stabbing on the screen. I didn’t even want to be drinking. It was just the only thing that even sort of worked to quiet all of the speech in my head. On the TV Krazy-8 coughed and spluttered his last. His hand dropped one last time. The shard fell and shattered. The barman clicked his tongue, looked away from the screen, and turned to me, saying, —Another? If he registered the look on my face, he was discreet about it. I loved him for that. People were so kind. It was all so moving.

—Always, I said, and slid the empty beer and the empty shot-glass towards him, trying to be helpful.

 

I drifted apart fairly quickly from Helen, the friend who’d gotten me the job. She was deep in with her recovery group and an on-and-off thing with this artist guy she’d met. He was forever on and off the spike, too, which took up a lot of her time.

—Codependency again, she’d joke, but it didn’t seem like she found it that funny.

—It’s so hard to say ‘no’ to people when they need you, I’d say, even though I was another one of the people she should probably have started saying ‘no’ to. She’d trek north from her parents’ house way south of the city, bringing me sandwiches made by her mother, or pillows and duvets because I didn’t have any. I’d never be where she was expecting to find me. I’d be spilling out of an Acapulco chair or coming down from the night before surrounded by people she didn’t really know, insisting she sit there with the duvet baled up between her knees until we got bored of each other. Her boyfriend and I got on really well. We’d go to her parents’ holiday home at Yautepec and silo ourselves off with a shared bag, while she drifted around reading or texting her sponsor. One birthday party got out of control: his friends and mine outnumbered hers, and she withdrew to the garden, stood by the edge of the pool. When my conscience managed to prick me through all the stuff in my system I walked over to her, said I was sorry.

—It’s alright, she said, squinting at the water. It’s even sort of clarifying.

—About?

—About what I want to do. About getting away from it. I feel like I’ve learned everything I can from city people.

She sipped her mix of sparkling water and lemon juice and salt. The pool filter hummed in the silence. From the house came the thud of the psychedelic electrocumbia that her boyfriend was obsessed by.

—I’m sorry, I said.

—I’m not guilt-tripping you, she said. She blessed the air like a priest at the end of Mass. You’re an addict. You’re absolved.

I said nothing, just felt the dark barb of it sink into my chest, felt the memory of drinking against my own will in that cantina after the meditation retreat.

—I suppose I am, aren’t I, I said.

—If you can’t stop, and you want to, then, well, maybe, yeah, she said.

She put a hand through her hair, let it flop back down.

—I’m not really at the races today, she said. Birthday. Never easy. Had relapse dreams all night.

—Do you want someone to drive you to a meeting or something?

She shook her head, said, —I’ve got my sponsor calling soon. And just hanging here is good. I’ll take someone’s head off if I go inside.

—Are we putting you in danger?

—In what way?

—Like wanting to take drugs and stuff.

She gave a one-shoulder shrug.

—How I think of relapse, she said, is how I think of the first time I went on holiday sober. I went to the beach. Sayulita. There’s a riptide. I wasn’t even that far out, but I remember the panic, and I remember feeling glad I was panicking, because it meant I wanted to live, actually, all along, and that was good, it meant I was committed to recovery or whatever. But I could feel something here.

She gripped the skin under her ribs.

—Right here. Just this sulky weight right here. Like a voice saying ‘Fuckit, let it take me, I was never meant to be here, I’m not even able to go on a holiday.’ And for a moment my body gave in. But the panic thrash was stronger than that. And that kept me energized enough to just calm my breath and move my arms slow as I could and my feet steady as I could and let the current do the rest, sucking me towards the other horn of the bay. And so you people, what you do, you give me enough panic to pull away against that feeling of ‘Fuckit, I don’t deserve to be well.’ Because I look around and I think ‘amateur hour’, and I think ‘Yeah, they don’t know they’re not having a good time.’ And it’s true. Because even though I’m not really enjoying being exiled from my own birthday party, I am still having more fun than him.

She gave a chin-jut over at the patio where her boyfriend was reeling around flirting with two girls, doubled over laughing one second, rearing back to get momentum into his own shouting the next.

—That’s. That’s good, I guess. I don’t like reminding you of that feeling. I’m really sorry.

That one-shoulder shrug again.

—Anything can remind me of that feeling, she said. Shower noise. When wind blows rain onto my forearms. When a car drives past and it’s a wet day. It’s good to know how little I can trust myself. It’s good to know I have to surrender to beat this thing. It’s good to just turn it over. Like, I used to think this was freedom, too. What you’re all doing, I mean. I used to think that doing what other people said I shouldn’t do was freedom. But it’s just defiance, you know. And, eventually, people stop telling you not to do what you want, because you’ll just do it anyway. And then, before you know it, you’re just defying yourself so you feel like what you’re doing is freedom.

—What’s freedom then?

—Obedience to some big, benign enigma. Obedience that doesn’t feel like obedience. Because you don’t quite know what you’re obeying. Because it’s not within your understanding. Because it’s a power bigger than your understanding. And maybe it’s just a language game, I don’t know, but it’s kept me clean for a while now. Just following the feeling of the next right thing. That’s cheesy as fuck but it’s as far as I can get. It just cuts through the knot. The simplicity, I mean. And it’s not like simplicity’s that fucking easy, either. Especially living in the city. God. I’d rather be nowhere at all than there sometimes.

—What, dead?

—Oh, no. This – she gestured with her hand back towards the party – this is dead. I was dead doing all of that. And I’ve come back from all that. No, nowhere as in off the grid.

Her phone flashed in her hand.

—That’s my sponsor, she said. You mind if I take this?

—Oh, no, go ahead, I said, putting my hands up, backing away, moving towards the lit patio, the noise, the laughs, their weird cold echo in the dark.

 

That might have been our last party. We were up around autumn 2014 by then. A couple of months later, I went to a protest against the murder of eight and the disappearance of forty-three teacher-trainees from outside the city of Iguala, in Guerrero – an atrocity, it was clear, that had been perpetrated by state and federal police. The teacher-trainees had been on their way to a commemoration of an earlier atrocity, in 1968, when police, soldiers and paramilitaries opened fire on pro-democracy protesters on Mexico City’s Plaza de Tlatelolco. This new atrocity came at a time when the police were doing stuff that previously only the cartels had been caught doing, like cutting off people’s faces. The government’s cynical attempted cover-up included the release of a grim animated video that contradicted everything people had seen that night, shared live to Twitter — juddery phone-camera footage of people fleeing gunshots, blood and glass and red police lights, the students themselves lined up with bruised faces in the corridor of what was clearly an army barracks. Weeks after their disappearance, you’d go into a fruit shop and see all forty-three missing boys’ faces staring out from posters pasted to the back wall. I went to Iguala, where they’d been shot and kidnapped, walking around the hills with family members looking for their bodies and the bodies of the other four hundred or so people who’d been disappeared over the past dozen years. I saw charred scraps of clothes at sites where gangs or cops or both took bodies to be burned. I smelled rot seeping up out of the ground. There was no way I was going to skip the protest.

We set off from the memorial of the Tlatelolco Massacre, on the big square under the modernist housing units, beside the wrecked church, and near the plaque that commemorates the battle that saw the Emperor Cuauhtémoc captured by the Spanish and the end of the resistance. Neither victory nor defeat, the plaque reads, but birth of the pueblo mestizo that is the Mexico of today. For what felt like hours, groups from the Politécnico and UNAM trickled in, carrying flags. The sky was low and rainy, like a ceiling with rotten plasterwork. Heading south through a highway tunnel, the roars and the chants turned to river noise, turned the seethe of fear in my veins into something like exhilaration. It was a better lostness than getting wasted, vanishing into that ocean sensation of everyone around, but washing me towards something, all the way to the blood-coloured stone of the Palacio Nacional and the big ranks of cops behind their shields. Rioters in black bloc made shit of the place — banks, Starbucks, bars dashed to pieces.

A friend got a jet of tear gas right in the face because she was putting a bouquet into one of the vents in the metal walls that they’d put up around the Palacio. That thinned our group: a couple of people went home with her. Those who stayed inched back from the front, joined in the chants, kept looking over our shoulders. The day darkened. It started to drizzle. I’m not sure when Helen and I became separated in the crowd. It was probably around the time it started to get hairy, the crowd heaving forwards and rocking backwards, pulling us with its tides. She’d been at all the big marches in 2006, so her instinct was to fall back. Mine was to push forwards. The Saturday before, protesters had managed to scorch the door of the Palacio Nacional. If something like that happened, I wanted to see it. But nothing did happen. My back started to hurt. I got hungry, antsy. The riot cops stood there yawning and texting behind their shields until the crowd chanted itself hoarse and tired, and then they cleared the space. They chased us down a corridor of waiting cops, ushered us into a long bus. We were a morass of limbs, a stopped rush-hour Metro. The humid press of other people, the shouts, the cries, the terror, the lads filming what was happening, the fact that they could do this and none of it would matter, it all made my chest tighten so hard and so fast that I felt like my mind was flowing up out of the top of my head in a long, yellowly translucent string of goop, flat to the ceiling of the bus, looking down on everything. What was happening to Helen? Cops always did worse stuff to women, especially if they stood up for themselves. As for myself, I’d already broken the law just by being at the protest without a media pass. I was a foreigner, they could deport you for intervening in national politics, and the government was taking a very broad interpretation of that: a couple of Chilean musicians had been picked up in a sweep after one of the big marches a few weeks before. They’d been busking, apparently. Whatever they’d been doing, they were put on the first plane back home. That was about to be me.

The door of the bus clattered open. I don’t know how long we’d been driving for. Hard light and cool air flooded the bus. I saw what looked like a large police station, a lot full of smashed cars, the bloody neons of a by-the-hour motel and some tired-looking women leaning against the sill, mildly intrigued to have something else to stare at while they waited.

—Come on, said a cop by the door. Come on, come on. It was like he was directing cattle. The bus emptied. I lingered. The cop poked his head in, saw me, and shook his head, laughing, and saying, —Jesus Christ. You fucking idiot. Just get the fuck home, will you?

I went to follow the stream of people going up the steps and through the doors, along another gauntlet of cops.

—Not there, the cop by the door said, grabbing me by the shoulder and shoving me in the opposite direction. There. He pointed towards the security fence, where the barrier was up. There. Go home. I told you.

One or two people in the line going through the door turned and shook their heads. One clicked his tongue and looked away.

—So you’re throwing back the white ones? I heard a woman say to a cop as she passed. He just scoffed at her. Then she was through the door, too.

I got out of the gate and staggered into the avenue. The sudden roar of the traffic stopped the air going in and out of my lungs. I pasted myself against the fence. My heart was going ninety. I was way, way south, beyond Taxqueña. Helen had brought her money belt, and I’d left my phone and wallet inside it. I’d have to walk home. I squinted at the road signs, felt a fatigue wash through me that was like a desert opening in my body. The shock was beginning to ebb now, bringing the cold instead. I zipped up my jacket and started to walk, my body shaking in the draught of every car that went past.

For the first bit of the walk I was sustained by the idea that once I got to Insurgentes, my familiarity with that strip of chain restaurants and bars might somehow convert the ground under my feet into a kind of conveyor belt that would bear me smoothly home. This did not happen. I was so out of it with thirst, hunger and the beginnings of withdrawal that at every pedestrian crossing I got honked or jostled. At one point I tripped chasing a hundred-peso note that turned out to be a flyer for a micro-loans company. My foot caught on an uneven bit of pavement and I went mouth-first into the ground, knocking a triangular chunk out of one of my front teeth. I started walking again, but quickly understood that it would be impossible to go any further. I let myself flop onto the ground, lay spread-eagled on my back. Late-shift workers were hurrying out of the mall, or hailing buses, or jogging for the last Metro. Too many of them were stopping to look at me. I heaved myself upright – my mouth parched, my body heavy, my head whumping, my jeans torn and bloody, my shirt stained and dusty – and started walking again. I let myself fall against the whitewashed pillar by the entry to an all-night open-air parking garage. A kid a bit younger than me was sitting in an office chair in the kiosk. He wheeled it back, craned his head out, said, —You need money or something?

—Water, I said. Just water. And sleep.

His foot tapped. He jingled change in his pocket. He was squinting, measuring it up.

—Yeah, OK, he said, and jerked his head towards a shed that had a mattress on the floor, covered with a rug that looked like one of the old Foxford ones that my mother kept in the boot of her car.

—Where’ll you sleep, though? I said, following him through.

—Oh, I won’t, he said. I’m on till 7.

—You know what address this is?

The kid gave it to me. I felt my stomach sink. I was still miles from home. If I got going while it was still cold the next morning, then maybe I could do it. I felt like I was gearing up for a trek through the desert, and hated myself for the thought. I’d interviewed people who’d been kidnapped, taken to the US border, sent across with backpacks full of fentanyl and only a tin of tuna to get them through the journey.

—Also, the kid said, and went out for a second, returning with a bottle of water and some biscuits with jam in them. I nearly wept.

Sleep didn’t come quickly. I kept jolting awake just as I was about to drop off. When I did finally go under, the dreams were of crammed cells, scratchy stone floors, people banging on bars and hammering their fists against plexiglass. This might have been guilt: I assume a lot of the people who had been on that bus were going through exactly what I was dreaming. When the kid opened the door early the next morning, he was holding a styrofoam cup of atole and half a cake bar held inside a twist of plastic packaging.

I set off and did OK for a while, munching and sipping in alternation as I walked north, sugar-rush quickening me ahead of the pain-thud in my skull; but as the morning began to heat up, and the pedestrians got more harried and numerous, and the traffic thickened on the avenue, with its skirl of brakes and din of horns, I couldn’t take it anymore, slid down an alley, looking for somewhere to lie down and shiver. I found myself in the back of a market and settled myself on a tarp. It was well past 7 in the morning: if the place was going to open today, it’d have opened by now, so I figured nobody would bother me.

When I woke, I saw that I was not the only person who’d washed up here. There was a guy with a towel belted around his head, sobbing; a woman with short hair and two missing eye-teeth and an Axl Rose bandana. When the lights went red, she’d move between the cars. When they went green, she’d sprint back to the square and resume scratching furiously at herself. The people passing through passed through fast, skirting the edges, eyes to the ground.

I watched two men who looked like a father and son working away at a torta truck. The son whisked up an omelette, laid it out with a rich spatter on the hotplate. The smell made my stomach feel like it was about to fall out. The stall was stuck all over with clippings of the father and son in the wrestling ring. Across the road a guy swayed back and forth, picking his lip, grinning at his reflection. The lights went red and a skinny topless guy around my age ran in front of the cars, rolled out a cloth tarp loaded with broken glass, then dived again and again on it until his chest and back ran with blood. Then the lights went green, he stood, rolled up his mat, and went with his hand out to the cars to see who had their windows down, who might give him change.  I was a long way from holiday homes in Yautepec, from gallery parties, from rooftop vernissages high up among the church domes and shimmering smog of the Centro. I’d only ever been hanging on to that kind of life by my fingernails. It was nearly a relief to finally accept that I’d fallen to the level meant for me all along.

The worst of it was that the square was around the corner from the house of a woman I used to go out with. I loved her house. I loved looking down from the mellow glow of the living-room over the streets, feeling like I was one of those people who lived such a calm life. The old Porfiriato houses were painted in cake tones — deep marzipan pink, piped-sugar orange, lime-cream green. Even the browns were deep and rich enough to make you want to sink your teeth into them. If I got into the neighbourhood before our dates, I’d sit at a Krispy Kreme and look up at the corner sitting-room of one of those houses. Munching my doughnuts, I’d almost be able to inhale the odour of the books in that room, and of the fabric softener used by the people living there. Now, I was afraid of being seen by the woman I used to go out with.

By late afternoon, when the brassy colour of the sky had begun to dull and the fermentation stink of the bins had begun to deepen, my mouth was too sticky to sleep through. I walked up to the torta stand and asked for a Dixie cup of agua de limón from the kinder-looking of the two guys working there, then pretended I couldn’t find any change while the guy waved it away and said, ‘Whatever, man, it’s five pesos’. I had become everybody I’d ever refused change to, everybody I’d looked through. I hovered around the edge of a little wooded square with a Tierra Garat café on it. The café terrace was packed. My body tingled all over with anticipatory shame. I’d never done this. I’d never had to. In my head I workshopped and tossed away possible lines the way I’d done with my paragraphs back in the times when I’d been able to write. I didn’t know how I was going to start begging. I could try a hard-luck story about being mugged. I could tell the truth, but the truth would take ages, and people with long sob-stories annoyed me. Then again, they also annoyed me so much that I reached quickly and briskly for my wallet and gave them more than I might have if I weren’t trying to make up for my own irritability. I was afraid to try. I was afraid they’d laugh, tell me to call my parents, because I was obviously white and foreign, and, odds were, people who looked like me might have mistreated them in the past.

I was about to make my move on the café’s customers when a man in his fifties with dyed chestnut hair unzipped a guitar case and started bashing out a cover version of ‘Sweet Caroline’. I couldn’t double up on him: he was working, I’d just be begging. So I sat through ‘Love Me Do’ and a Supertramp song, watched him go table to table with his hand out, and wondered how much longer I’d need to wait until there were enough new customers to get something out of them. I was sitting under an alcove with a Virgin Mary statue in it, some dead roses in a disposable coffee cup at her feet. My eyes scanned the terrace. I felt someone’s gaze on me, turned, looked, saw a woman waving me over to her table. As I approached, I apologized in Spanish, started to talk about losing my wallet. She just looked at me, her gaze totally steady, and said, —I can give you a thousand pesos, but I don’t think this is all what you need.

Her accent wasn’t local. A barista watched me from the doorway, a look of threat and disgust. The woman pointed at me and looked to the barista, then switched to Spanish, saying, —Get him one more of these – she shook her cup at him – and one of those cheesecakes, yes? She was wearing a leopard-print hoodie complete with little roundy ears. I felt annoyed with her for a second. I’d have preferred her to just offer me money. In a choice between hunger and the dose, you always pick the dose because first it numbs hunger and then it makes you too tired to feel hungry once it’s gone. But cheesecake would definitely do. It has done, many times, in the years since.

—Are you OK, madame? the barista said. Do you want me to get rid of this man?

—I want you to get him his order. She dismissed the barista with a wave of her hand. Then she looked at me. So, will you sit or what? When I did, she pushed a packet of Marlboro Red towards me.

—So, she said. Rough day?

I didn’t know what to say. She seemed to be speaking to me from the middle of a tunnel of white headrush needles.

—And water, too, she said, when the barista reappeared with the cake and the coffee.

My hands were shaking too much to tear open the sugar I wanted to pour in.

—Here. Her nails were like claws, diamante-edged. She made short work of the sachets. You need a lot of sugar, no? The comedown. The heroin, no?

I said nothing.

—In Egypt, my country, she said, I flipped two cars on heroin. Driving. I killed two people. And this two separate occasions. One before the recovery, another in the relapse.

I had forked up a bit of cheesecake too soon. The gluey paste of it stuck to my lip.

—I was in ICU then, she said. Nobody was happy when I woke up. This is not self-pity, this is fact. Six years and three countries ago.

I looked at the level of coffee in her cup. She’d be gone in a few minutes. Then the barista’d chase me away. I took a bigger bite of the cake, took a big gulp of the coffee. I already felt full – your stomach shrinks if you don’t eat right for a few years – but I kept cramming it down. I wanted to get back to my building before it was dark. I needed all the energy I could get.

She kept talking.

—Now I work as perfumier here. Candles, air fresheners, personal fragrances, everything like that. I thought I had lost this. It all comes back. It can come back so much faster than you think.

—How’s that meant to happen? I said.

—You come to a meeting, I think. She checked her watch. It was chunky and gold. One starts in some minutes. You can come with me.

—I’m worried about my friend, I said. I want to check in on her but she has my phone.

The woman – her name was Noura – slid her phone across the table.

—You know the number by heart?

—Jesus. I don’t even know my own.

—She has family here?

—Oh, loads. And she’s in some recovery programme or other, too. So she’s one of yours.

—So you won’t be the only one looking for her. If something bad was going to happen, it would have happened by now. So just turn it over. Let it go. You’re only responsible for one thing right now.

—I can’t see how a meeting’s meant to work. I have other problems.

—You have one big problem only. And there are people can help you with this. Then you can worry about the other smaller piles of shit. She sucked on her cigarette, spat smoke, shrugged. The tic felt cheesy to me, like she was imitating the stoicism you see in films or whatever. Maybe she was. Thinking, now, of the way my prose has a kind of baked, ceramic hardness, like a theatrical mask, and how my mannerisms are fixed, too, anticipations more than responses – my brain quickly going, ‘OK, this situation feels like this, so contain it in this way’ – I understand her better. At the time, though, I didn’t think any of this: I just felt she was sort of odd, but also that I’d been around people who were more odd and had worse intentions, so she was cool, ish, in the scheme of things.

—I haven’t found much else, Noura went on. The meetings are as close to peacefulness as it gets.

She got her phone out, checked the screen.

—There’s no obligation. But if you can hang in with us for an hour, I can take you wherever you need to be then.

—Yeah, OK, I said.

She paid and we went around the corner, up Insurgentes a little way, then crossed into Napoles. It wasn’t a long walk, but it felt like ages, because the calm and relief in me turned everything to slo-mo. I remember a pharmacy whose dim light inside made me think of a ’70s film. Then, a sign with a blue triangle with the words ‘Narcóticos Anonímos’ written on it. Below was a doorway with a drawn-up metal shutter, light and cigarette smoke spilling out of it. Men and women were settling into chairs, collecting coffees, finishing up phone calls. A couple of them waved to me and smiled like they knew me.

—Welcome to your house, Noura said, wiggling her fingers in greeting at a couple of people, then taking a chair in the back row, nearest the door.

I sat down beside her. The plastic chairs felt like the ones from my secondary school, and the room smelled like the staff room there: cigarette smoke, mingled warm body-fugs, deodorant, perfume. I had that scratchy tiredness that makes everything feel annoying. The others seemed twitchy, itchy, texting like crazy, legs jogging, feet tapping. Two men were talking over one another. Anyone who laughed laughed too loudly. There was no dress code: fancy blazers and sharp pantsuits, scruffy leisurewear, biker gear, fishnet corsets and high boots. Nobody felt exemplary. Nothing about the room, from the infected-looking plaster to the corded carpet, none of it made me want to stay there. I thought of the lift home and wondered if I could maybe just fucking walk instead. But there weren’t any drugs in the room, and the strongest liquid in the place was sputtering into a percolator. The guy manning the coffee station was lorrying sugar into a greyed mug.

A heavyset man settled himself on a plastic chair at the head of the room and rang a bell with a dainty motion.

—Alright, let’s call this meeting to order, he said. I’m Alejandro, I’m an addict, and welcome to the New Dawn meeting of Narcotics Anonymous.

—Hi, Alejandro, said the room.

—Hi, Alejandro, I said.

—Is there anyone here attending their first meeting, or this meeting for the first time?

Noura looked at me. So did a couple of others. I put my hand in the air. The room clapped.

—Welcome, Alejandro said. You’re the most important person here.

My nose fizzed. The room blurred. The relief was like nothing I’ve ever felt before or since. It was the inverse of the feeling I’d had when my father had almost caught me in my problem, that sensation like a jet-plane taking off right in front of me, lifting my whole skin in a hot shiver all the way off my bones. This feeling, now, was like something landing. I remember every word of what Alejandro said. In retrospect it was just boilerplate stuff, guidance for the newcomer, a couple of gnarly anecdotes, some scalding jokes: the kind of routine you do for anyone who comes into a meeting for the first time. But they’re the only text I know off by heart, beginning to end. No poem comes close, no paragraph, no novel’s opening, no ending to any short story comes close, because his were the only words that made me feel like I didn’t need to hear anything else. They were the only words that made me feel like I didn’t need to speak. This was the home feeling I’d been after all along. They didn’t come into being, any of the places I’d been, just for me to come along and take a story out of them. No: the best stories I’d ever find, the stories that’d keep me alive, the stories I could never tell anyone, I’d find them here, in rooms like these. The relief felt like the rush of some drug, but cooled, cleared, like a wind. This feeling passed, of course, but the windburned glow it left in me afterwards is still kind of there. The first meeting is like that first hit or that first drink, the one that knits up all your problems and makes you feel safer than the womb. None of the others feel the same. You keep upping the dose. You keep chasing that initial high. You dive deeper and deeper into the programme, but you never get back that first-meeting sensation, that rich, delicious hit of belonging, of a comprehension so total that it’s like a soul X-ray taken by a technician whose intention is only to love. But the chase is reason enough to keep coming back.

 

Noura dropped me home and I got out. The portero met me at the door as I was looking for my keys. The look on his face was apologetic.

—They called around while you were gone, he said. The owner and her family, I mean. And. Well.

He lifted my two old sports bags and placed them at my feet. Then he reached behind the door and took out two Amazon boxes, the ones with all my books in them.

—They opened up, he said. They found some things.

—Ah, I said. I felt the floor dropping out of my stomach. Pins and needles were coming out all over my body. Noura lowered the window of her car and watched, eyes narrowed against the smoke wafting back from her cigarette.

—You know, the portero said. You know what I mean when I say ‘they found things’.

I saw them in my head: the blood spatter that I’d kept meaning to mop off my ceiling, the glass-topped table crosshatched with razor-marks from all the lines I’d chopped out, the bin of syrettes and bloodied foil and torn-open baggies, the forest of empties.

—They didn’t want to kick you out, the portero said. It’s just the son’s getting divorced. So they’re selling the place.

So even if I hadn’t been homeless when I’d slept rough on the street, I was homeless now. I had a bit over twenty-four hours without drinking or huffing a line of powder or shooting up, and this was the thanks I was getting.

—They called round to let you know, the portero said. They didn’t want to kick you out, like I said. You’re behind, they said.

It was true. I was four months behind on my rent. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money — not exactly. The bills piled up on my floor like big drifts of dead moths, because they couldn’t legally cut off your water, and the electricity and internet companies gave you a month’s grace before cutting you off. If I paid right before the cutoff it felt like saving money, and the amount saved was worth a bottle of Centenario Reposado a month. Rent pissed me off, anyway, even if it was way less than in other places. When my landlord said nothing after two weeks, I inched it to a month; when she said nothing after a month, I pushed it to six weeks. After two months, she sent round the building manager: not to kick me out, just to see if everything was OK. He was a nice man with wire-framed glasses and a sweater that looked like the fuzzy coloured static you’d get on old TVs. He’d said to pay what I could when I could. What I could when I could sounded good to me. I wanted to see how much I could get away with, and then see if I could get out of whatever jam that put me into. I didn’t think of this as half-conscious self-harm: I just thought of it as the source of an adrenal shiver all up and down the front of my ribcage. This went for the day-to-day budgetary chaos, and for bigger disasters, like the grand and a half I’d lost on an expensive, dangerous reporting trip to Honduras.

Behind me I heard Noura popping the boot of the car. When I turned around, she was jabbing her thumb behind her. I walked over, dropped the bags in. The portero brought the boxes.

—Well, it’s been lovely having you, he said, and put his hand out to shake mine.

—I wouldn’t, I said, and raised my sticky, dirty palms.

So he bumped his elbow against mine, then went back inside, to his den of Futbol Azteca and cigarette smoke.

Noura talked to her boyfriend on the speaker phone she’d hooked up to her car radio, told him what was happening. Of the three of us, he sounded most relaxed about the situation.

She took me back south again, as far as Narvarte. Her boyfriend, Omar, was a tanned guy with V-shaped upper body from what must have been a lot of gym time, and a sharply sculpted beard.

—Are you in the programme, too? I said, as he took one box under one arm, and the second under his other arm.

—No, no, he said. I’m completely normal.

—Oh, I said.

—Joking, he said. I’ve got five years. Noura and I met in that meeting.

—I took advantage of him, she said, as we followed her into the house. She had the strap of the larger of my sports bags over her shoulder. I was carrying the smaller one.

—And continues to, he said. He was holding the door open for me with his heel.

She took me to a maid’s room on the flat roof. Inside was a single bed and a small desk with an office chair. A router extender blinked in the corner. The room was tiny and snug. I wanted to cry.

—And welcome to your house, again, Noura said, as Omar held a keyring out to me.

—Front door, azotea door, your door, he said, counting off the keys. Bathroom is a pain in the ass. He pointed. That shed in the corner of the roof.

—That’s no problem, I said. And you aren’t afraid I’ll rob you or something?

Omar squinted. Noura shrugged, then said, —Not really, no.

—You seem very tired, Omar said. It’d be pretty easy to catch you.

—Yeah, I said, and sat down on the bed. A clean smell bloomed up. You’re not wrong.

—There’s some plasters and things in that little box under the desk, Omar said.

—We should let you sleep, Noura said.

Omar gave me a little military salute, and then they got out of there.

I fell back on the bed in the same shape as I’d fallen down on the traffic island the night before, arms flung out, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. My head thumped in fast time with my heart, but it was a good pain, almost, because I was able to take it. I wasn’t running off to numb it. I didn’t want to do that anymore. There was no need. The thumping fell quiet after a while, and then the rest of the noise in my head and my body did, too, and then I was gone.

 

As with addiction, so with recovery: I need to begin with the shit. Sometimes I couldn’t even get across the roof to the little hut with the jacks and the shower, so I’d just take my syrupy shits right into the scissored-off neck of a water bottle, pour it out when I felt well enough. The vomit felt like a joke, thick black chunks in it, like solidified pain coming up. All this time on the drugs I’d wanted to be empty, a vehicle for askesis, finding a void, lingering there, but really I’d been avoiding that void all along. Evenings were bad. I’d zone out, see things dancing at the foot of my bed, faces cratered and bearded and red, bunched up like Caravaggio’s late drunks, the ones who giggle when saints are dying. I could only eat white things: rice, peeled apples, cereal left in milk for a long time, the potato filling of quesadillas from a street-corner stall that I could just about make it to. Everything tasted like foil, anyway, but the colour made me feel clean. When the weather was stormy, I’d see other stuff: a hunched pianist with a beard like steel wool, playing the storm like a piano, deep rubato for the rolling thunder, his scales rising and turning into the rusted fire escape shackled to the side of an old apartment block I’d had to run out of once.

Except to make quick gallops to the tortilleria, for the sort of food I could reheat quickly, most days I was too panicked to leave the roof. The mix of light and air pollution felt like falling clouds of hot salt. I’d wait out the day, reading again, at last: at first just the Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text in Spanish, then the books that I’d toted over from Ireland and never gotten around to. I’d sit on the edge of the roof, waggling my legs in space, like I was about to swim off into the air, reading about Trotsky fleeing from Kazakhstan to Istanbul to France to Norway and finally to Mexico, where he lived among the burned-out and blacklisted Hollywood stars, the Republican refugees of Spain, Levantine cloth merchants from the collapsed eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and others in need of a geographical Plan B. I pictured his last few months alive as a kind of soul holiday, there under the tiny private sky of butterflies that Frida Kahlo painted on the ceiling of her four-poster bed, or living out his bivouac life in hiding on Calle Viena, named after the city where he’d spent his second spell of exile, a rhyming kind of a return, origin the goal, too perfect to be anything but an ending, lying on a metal camp-bed in his studio during the dizzy spells brought on by his high blood pressure, and then, when his body allowed, gardening, fishing, chilling out with dogs, toting a fat cactus down out of the mountains, dining on yellow-painted straw-seat chairs with a family of fellow exiles, writing essays with Breton, reading French translations of Kafka, dreaming out loud with Victor Serge of a day when psychoanalysis would be a revolutionary right and there would be no more need for new art, cultural life no longer anything more than a stroll through the arcades of the interesting, the obsolete, and the poignant.

When it rained, the street drains muttered and boiled with a dark glar of trash: prawn shells, dropped tortillas, crumpled Pepsi bottles, muck, shit. There’d be pictures on Twitter of inundated Metro stations, brown water spilling onto the tracks, flooding the rush-hour platforms. Signs in the street warned people not to litter, because about half the floods are caused by trash blocking the sewers. However long it takes, history always comes out at the sump end. The earth had been mined hollow, and now it was fixing to swallow us all. In my dreams big sinkholes opened in the pine trees south of the city, the topsoil and grass and trees sliding into the void in one unbroken piece like a tablecloth with all the plates and cutlery still on it. There was an alamo tree in Iztapalapa that I’d seen, right where a quesadilla stand got swallowed, the branches hung all over with pink ribbons and dead bouquets where the rain opened a void in the ground and took in the stall-owner, her family, her customers. It was that kind of rain. Anything could be happening out there.

I would lie on the warm roof in my underpants and feel the phosphor seethe of the rain batter away all sensation of the post-heroin flu. I got in a whole load of electrolytes and Tylenol, but the headache and the chalkiness around my throat never seemed to go away. I’d chicken-walk nude and weeping around the room, feeling my muscles tighten, bending me around the need until I thought the filaments would snap. No longer buried in the old slush of drink and powders, I finally started to feel how noisy Mexico City really was, how trucks zooming by would shudder the walls, and I had to buy earplugs. I phoned in for cheap three-course meals from the little comida corrida place around the corner. I couldn’t finish more than one course at a sitting, so it’d last me all day. My stomach might have shrunk, but there always seemed to be more vomit. I cleaned my sores with rubbing alcohol, resisting the urge to swig from the bottle, the sweetish note of it sending me surfing over whole zones of recollection until the memories made my ribs ache. I woke up with shivers, stiffness and shakes rising up from way deep in me, and with nothing to take for it. Every day started to seem like an enemy I had to kill. I’d wake up and the day would be standing over me, staring down, unblinking, and somehow I’d have to get out from under that gaze. Mostly I just waited until it was dark, trying not to think of that first golden hit of the day, the one that’d scatter me to photons. I’d startle out of naps, clouds of butterflies with five-hundred-peso notes for wings blooming up out of drifts of coke and following me out of my sleep, and it’d take me a second of panic sobbing to remember that those billows weren’t there, that the relapse hadn’t happened.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but those rooftop days have a still luminosity to them that makes them seem to exist apart from all of the time either side of them. My happiness in those days had a flat texture. It was as though it was happening to someone else. And that peaceful exhaustion after writing the day’s pages and not hating every line, not feeling like I’d lied — that’s something I get back to now, too, a lot of the time. I can’t ask writing to do more for me than that.

Noura would come up to do step work with me, and bring me to meetings if I didn’t look too ill. She’d read out the questions in the step-working guide, I’d read back the answers. A lot of the time my writing was too squiggly to read. But I had so little in my head that I was able to remember more or less what I’d written. I’d copy down the questions in red, answers in blue, double-space the line, just like in secondary school.

I couldn’t bear the meeting room, couldn’t sit still, but couldn’t leave, either, because I knew the places I’d be beelining towards if I stormed out of there. So I just tried to hold that word ‘recovery’ in my head, turning it over and over the way people walking through a desert turn a flat pebble over and over, because the cool weight of it feels almost like water. Skeat’s etymological dictionary called it ‘a difficult word’. I couldn’t argue. Then he gave it a stab, drew up the word for ‘to get well again’ in Latin. I hated that. ‘Again’ didn’t apply: I hadn’t ever been all that well. How was I going to recognize wellness at all, then?

One of the days doing step work with Noura, I read out a long answer to one of her questions. After I finished she was quiet, like she was waiting for me to continue.

—It’s all I’ve got, I said, and looked up from my notebook to see her looking at me steadily, sitting forward on one of the plastic faux-Eames chairs she kept on the roof.

—What? I said.

—That was very insightful, she said. And, well, quite gripping.

—Are you being sarcastic?

—Not at all. You really got a hold on this one. She flipped back through the pages of the step-working guide. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. You’ve basically nailed all of them.

—Huh. I started to go back through the pages, rubbing my fingers over the nubbled surface where I’d been driving the pen into the paper. I hadn’t even been worried about what I was saying, or how. I just wanted it out of me. The pages were crisp, like onion-skin, teeming with script. There was no style to it. Maybe that’s why it had an impact on her: because I hadn’t been waving my hand in the air looking for an audience, like I had been before. The only thing I’d been gunning for the whole way along was the empty tired feeling that came when I’d filled a few pages for the day.

—It doesn’t feel too special, written down, I said. Just seems sort of small. And not even that bad. But, you know, just also sort of not a big deal. Because it fits the format of those questions. So it’s not special. It’s not me.

—It is and it isn’t, she said. It’s the same pain as everyone in the programme has. So you can use it as a bridge towards them, maybe. Service and stuff. Compassion, maybe, if you can get that far. When you come out of your own pain you’re already moving towards helping someone else out of theirs. Because it may as well not even be your own pain, when you’re solving it. It’s just generalized.

—It’d be nice to feel sorry for someone else for a change, I suppose.

—That’s as good as it gets at first.

This was day thirty-six. I’d read or heard something about how the first forty days trying to kick something helped to reset your body’s relationship to it. I’d promised myself I could use again on day forty-one, but now I didn’t feel like it. Noura wouldn’t call me insightful again if I cracked. That was something to lose.

Noura suggested that I go out of town for Step Four. —A little holiday.

—And you don’t think I’d go AWOL?

—You might, she said, but you have to test yourself sometimes, no? Just a little.

I thought of an empty beach, way off the drag, somewhere in Veracruz. I’d gone there as part of a job I’d done once, working as a risk analyst for renewable-energy companies. They wanted to know if places were too dangerous to invest in. They’d send me down, I’d send back a report, they’d decide to invest or not. The reports were easy. I’d go to the place, find that it was dangerous, say, ‘Yes, it’s dangerous’, and they’d give me money. But this beach was in a sort of bubble of safety right between two horribly dangerous places. The bus would get me there in four hours, along the new highway to Tuxpan.

 

I did as I was told. I rang up the contact for the half-finished holiday villas that I’d seen last time, and bribed the caretaker to let me stay there. I arrived with an armful of jalapeño-flavoured crisps in the biggest bags available, a brick of 7/11 coffee, and about a dozen cans of Dr Pepper. There wasn’t a bar open for miles. The only drug deals you could do around here were the distribution-level kind. The gardener nodded timidly at me as he passed on his way over to the stand of fruit trees that he was planting in the muck, but otherwise left me alone. The water stopped at six in the evening, the electricity not long after.

On my first night, a tropical storm drew a dark line across the horizon, like the margins I’d draw down the side of the page before I started writing. I took that as a signal. I installed myself on one of those silly faux-sixties-looking stools they’d put in at the marble counter and didn’t get up until I was finished. And then I went outside, into that cold, rinsed morning and its cloud like the folds of a brain. The wind raked my hair back, made a parachute of the Hawaiian shirt I was wearing over my vest. It was more poem than novel. The moment felt like it was happening to someone else. But that was OK. I was alive. I was sober. I felt like the wind was inside me, making little quiffs and whitecaps in my blood, dancing them up and down. If that wasn’t happiness, it’d have to do.

 

These days, I still don’t think I’ll ever feel well. I almost hope that I won’t. Honestly, if I worry about anything, I worry about serenity. I worry that the bad feelings that used to lacerate me will shrink to a size that will fit into sincere Twitter threads or letters to the editor. I worry that I’ll one day imagine myself sitting at the same table as the kind of people I used to want to please and failed to impress. I worry that if my night-time screams die to a murmur and I get my eight hours’ sleep a night that I’ll wind up praising sabotage and riot actions but fear participating in them. I worry that I’ll end up buying a dog, letting my care for that animal become the template for the imagined, vaguely social-democratic contract that has shrink-wrapped the utopia of my older revolutionary horizons. I’ll always feel like there’s an underground river sucking away under everything I say and do to try to be better. It’s all the pain, I guess, most of which is older than me. There are three rivers: my past, my family, and my addictions. They are all trying to pull me into the land of the dead.

I’m tapping this into my phone standing outside the building where we have the meetings. Under the hard cold spitting rain, the light in the window is small and yellow. The recovery group on right before ours is still in session, a guy at the podium gesticulating hard with the heel of his fist. The wild nervature of a bare tree pokes out through the plaster and concrete above an altar to la Santa Muerte across the road. It’s like a machine for forgetting itself, this place. If I want to remember at all anymore, I want memory to deepen and lengthen, become a space, a dimensionality, a road-trip through the head. I don’t know what else there is to do with the sensation. So I try to just let the memory arise and pass away, stay in the day – because my life’s alright, mostly, albeit in the jittery, self-reassuring way Lou Reed says alright in ‘Rock & Roll’, as though there were no state closer to nirvana than alright, no situation that couldn’t be resolved if you could just figure out how to feel alright. My life used to feel like a novel that was happening to someone else who shared my name. I was the star of my own tragedy. Now I’m a bit-part guy in something bigger than me. I think that’s alright. It slows time down.

Tomorrow morning, while it’s still dark, I’ll walk through Parque Chapultepec’s cool smells of leaf mould and soaked earth. I’ll kill time at the Starbucks where I used to doze between classes, rocking myself back and forth on one toe, shielded by green plant stems, among the orchids and the pale lilac gardenias and the bird-of-paradise flowers. As the sun rises, the Tlaloc statue across the road will slowly change from a bulky shadow to a sand-coloured chunk of stone warming in the light. I’ll get my ticket for the museum while the sky is still that old-photo blue and while the plants are all still wet enough for me to feel like their green tint is hissing against my ear. I’ll feel that lake moisture on my bare forearms, same as I did on that first morning here. I’ll move through the gloom of the museum and its river-odour of ancient stone. I’ll take out my phone, checking the photos that my mother has sent me – the ones from my Granddad’s encyclopaedias – against the artifacts behind glass, until I find the one I remember from when I was eight: a mother goddess and a death goddess, Coatlicue. Not the big one, the famous one, with her apron of serpents that look like corn, but a small one, looking almost friendly, her teeth bared in a grin, one hand up, a skeletal foetus cradled across the crooks of her forearms, her eyes somehow smiling as well as blankly avid. If there’s no one around I’ll roll my sleeve up, check her against the tattoo of la Santa Muerte that I have there. They say she’s based on a mix of Coatlicue and the Virgin Mary. There was a shrine to her near my first apartment. I’d pass her every day on my way to the Metro. She was always wearing a blue dress. I always felt like she was keeping me safe. If there were a way to turn to the long-gone kid that I was all that time ago and ask him if he thought we’d followed those pictures all the way to the end, until that feeling of home and that feeling of elsewhere bled into one, then I’d do it, and, if he were able to answer, I feel like he’d tell me that yeah, we’ve made it home.

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