And so she came bearing gifts in a baking pan covered with tinfoil.
“What’ve you got there?” the old woman asked.
“Um,” Pandora said, pulling back the shiny cover, “happy . . . brownies?”
“You mean medibles?”
“How do you . . . ?”
“I’m not a prisoner here,” Gladys said. “Not yet anyway. I walk. I meet people. They talk. You’re not the only relative with a green thumb in baking.”
“So?” Pandora said, moving the pan a little closer.
Gladys reached in. “Well,” she said, “it would be rude to refuse . . .”
“Cheers,” her granddaughter said, tapping her own hash brownie against her grandmother’s, a helpful hand underneath to catch any crumbs.
Now this was the way to visit an old-folks’ home! Because while Pandora got a kick out of her grandmother before, she loved Gladys stoned. The feeling, predictably, was mutual.
“Another?” the old lady said, pushing the pan across the kitchenette table toward her granddaughter.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Pandora said, brushing invisible crumbs off her chin, shirt, and pants, before working up another square of THC-laced chocolatey goodness.
“You know how I knew Alaska was going to be different from anything I’d known before?” Gladys asked around a mouthful of brownie.
Pandora shrugged.
“The toilets. The indoor ones,” the old lady said. “I’m sitting on a toilet, and all of a sudden, I’m wondering if I’m having hot flashes even though I was way too young at the time. Why? My butt was sweating to beat the band. I reached for the toilet paper, and I almost slipped off. And I don’t know what possessed me, but after I flushed, I held my hand over the water. It was warm. I could feel the heat coming off it. That’s what told me Alaska was different. They heated their toilet water so it wouldn’t freeze.”
“So they don’t do that everywhere else?” Pandora asked. She’d not been outside the state since she was a baby, and well before being potty trained.
“Not where I came from,” Gladys said. Paused. “Can you bring some more of these next time?”
“Of course,” Pandora said.
Not.
It should be stressed that the legal status of marijuana in the state of Alaska was a bit bipolar at best. First decriminalized in 1975 and then legalized shortly thereafter, pot was recriminalized by 1990, re-decriminalized by court ruling in 2003, recriminalized by law in 2006, and finally legalized (again) by ballot initiative in 2014. So what Pandora was doing wasn’t currently against state law, just the federal ones. And even those weren’t a big deal under the previous administration, but then . . .
“I’m sorry, dear,” a receptionist said the next time Pandora prepared to walk past with a foil-covered plate of organic mood modifiers, “but I’ll be confiscating those.”
“Huh?” And then Pandora noticed a dog that hadn’t been there the last time. She eyed it and it eyed her back, both flaring nostrils on high alert.
“You can feel free to be charged with a federal crime out there,” the receptionist said, pointing outside, “but you’re not finding any accomplices in here.” She slid a copy of the laminated explanation that informed her that due to a change in federal policy put in place by an attorney general who had personal investments in the for-profit prison industry, the Golden Heart’s previous practice of looking the other way was history.
“Seriously?” Pandora said, handing back the wobbly sheet of plastic.
“Like a heart attack,” the receptionist said, shaking the pan into a wastebasket already lined with a biohazard baggie, the brownies dislodging in twos and threes, reminding Pandora of nothing so much as reindeer scat dotting the snow as its depositor lumbered along.
“Sorry, Gram,” Pandora said, after showing up empty-handed.
“About?”
“The brownies,” her granddaughter said. “I promised to bring more, but the gestapo at the guest center seized them.”
Gladys had gotten up during her granddaughter’s apology and seemed not to be listening. She went to her mini fridge and pulled out a plastic tub. “You mean these?” she asked, pulling back the lid to reveal a few leftovers from the day before.
Pandora was touched that she’d saved them. She’d assumed Gladys would do what she’d do—take as needed until they were gone.
Her grandmother divided the remaining brownies onto two paper plates, one for Pandora, one for her. Glasses of milk followed. “Now where were we?” the old lady asked.
“Toilets, I think,” Pandora said, figuring they’d exhausted the subject anyway.
Not.
They fascinate us at the brackets of life, these receptacles for putting up with our shit. Both when we’re young (and learning to use them) and again when we’re old (and forgetting what we learned). But even granting the fondness her grandmother often displayed for discussing bowel movements and assorted related topics, Pandora was unprepared for what Gladys casually said next: “Your father was born in a toilet.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Plopped out right into the bowl,” Gladys said. “It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in my entire life. Your grandfather practically faints, but I’m the one with the kid coming out of me like some astronaut doing a spacewalk. You ever see a fresh umbilical cord? Nasty . . .”
“You’re serious,” Pandora said, snap-sobered and horrified.
“Listen,” her grandmother said, “it was fine. There wasn’t anything else in the toilet, and the water’s always warm, so . . .”
“My dad was born in a toilet,” Pandora said, repeating the words, cementing the memory, as if there was a chance in hell she’d ever forget. She could practically hear the splash.
“Yep,” Gladys said. “Little shit turned out okay, though.”
Pandora was still too stunned to laugh. Ah, but once that wore off—well, then it was a different story.
Gladys had been happy to have her granddaughter there and was happy while the visit and brownies lasted, but once both were gone, the old dark clouds rolled back in. And here’s the funny thing about being happy: it’s addictive. Maybe not chemically or biologically, but emotionally, which can be more powerful than the other two combined. And so in a moment of weakness, Gladys took one of those pills designed to either make her happy or help her forget that she wasn’t.
Nothing.
The pill pusher had left her paperwork explaining that that’s the way it would go with one of them at first, warning that she’d have to keep taking it, let it build up in her system, before it would make a difference. She’d already forgotten that part but reminded herself of it by rereading what the doctor left, then comparing the paperwork to the label on the vial she’d taken the pill from. Zoloft. Right. That was the one that took weeks to do anything. She checked the paperwork for the other. Xanax. That was the one that worked right away. “Well, let’s hope so,” she said, fishing one out and placing it on her tongue.
14
Imagine the tech version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory minus the Oompa-Loompa slave labor, or Santa’s toy shop minus its elfish servitude. That’s what the Q-Brain tour was like for George, wandering agog. When it came to “wow factor,” Q-Brain was pretty much nothing but, starting with the very first stop: the Glass Brain.