Diary of a Drug Fiend

58 The Diary of a Drug Fiend I had a vision of myself as a peacock strutting and preening. Lou, her mouth half open, was gazing at me fascinated with enormous eyes; the pupils dilated by cocaine. It was just the male bird showing off to his mate. I wanted her to adore me for my little scraps of knowledge; the fragments I had picked up inmy .- abandoned education. Lou is always practical; and she puts something of the priestess into everything she does. There was a certain solemnity in the way in which she took up the heroin on the blade of a knife and put it on to the back of her hand. “My Knight,” she said, with flashing eyes, “ your Lady arms you for the fight.” And she held out her fist to my nostrils. I snuffed up the heroin with a sort of ritualistic reverence. I can't imagine where the instinct came from. Is it the sparkle of cocaine that excites one td take it greedily, and the dullness of the heroin which makes it seem a much more serious business? I felt as if I were going through some very important ceremony. When I had finished, Lou measured a dose for herself. She took it with a deep, grave interest. I was reminded of the manner of my old professor at U.C.H. when he came to inspect a new case; a case mysterious but evidently critical. The excitement of the cocaine had somehow solidified. Our minds had stopped still, and yet their arrest was as intense as their previous motion. We found ourselves looking into each other’s eyes with no less ardour than before; but somehow it was a different kind of ardour. It was as if we had been released from the necessity of existence in the ordinary sense of the word. We were both wondering who we were and what we were and what was going to happen ; and, at the same time, we had a positive certainty that nothing could possibly happen. It was a most extraordinary feeling. It was of a kind quite unimaginable by any ordinary mind. I