My husband and I bought weed at the local hash dispensary where the budtender, who looked like David Foster Wallace—bandanna-capped hair, wire-rimmed glasses, soft unshaven face—informed us about the holistic health benefits of CBD for pain control. He recommended two kinds of vapes and edibles, which we purchased and brought back to the apartment to smoke with my in-laws, John and Rachel. It was early August, a hot and dry day. John had recently moved to Centennial, a suburb of Denver, to work as a radio consultant for Clear Channel before being forced into retirement three months after his arrival. A former Top 40 deejay, John always talked to his family as if he was interviewing them on air.
“So Cathy, who would you say your muse is?”
“So Cathy, what are your top ten poetry books?”
John used to live in Dallas with Rachel. But when his company decided to move him for the third time in two years, Rachel had put her foot down and said she was staying. Rather than take that as a sign their marriage was troubled, John moved to Denver by himself. His new apartment, with its gray leather couch, glass coffee table, and flat-screen TV, was as bare and impersonal as if it were regularly rented out on Airbnb.
Around noon, once we settled in, we vaped several rounds of sativa. Almost immediately, we had cravings, even though we’d had brunch a couple of hours ago. “I wish you’d bought some snacks,” Rachel complained. Eager to please his wife, John rose up and brought out a bag of zero-calorie popcorn, three waxy red apples, and some dry carrot sticks—the unmunchiest of snacks possible. My husband, Jeremy, took a bite of the apple and then asked, “Do you have anything else, Dad?”
John looked in the refrigerator and offered us a carton of blueberries. I popped a few in my mouth. They were so flavorless I was sure that my taste buds had died. Weed was supposed to accentuate flavors, but in this case it accentuated the ominous absence of flavor. Instead, I tasted the thousands of miles this fruit had traveled, the carbon emissions wasted, the gloved hands that aborted the berries before their ripening.
“I think I prefer the apple,” Jeremy said.
Rachel and I screamed with laughter. Jeremy joined in, while John looked at us, confused. I wiped tears from my eyes as I tried to explain to John why it was so funny: I thought it was only me who was freaked out that blueberries had no flavor, because I was so high! But Rachel and Jeremy were also freaked out about the blueberries, though they thought it was because they were high. When really, we were all thinking of it at the same time, in sync, I said ecstatically. And there we have the bonding effect of weed: the creeping paranoia that no one else shares the intensity of your sensations, before the euphoric wash of relief that your sensations are actually shared by all—that you are, in fact, not alone.
We decided to buy snacks at the gas station convenience store. Traffic sped past us as we walked for ten minutes along the main thoroughfare. I always found perambulating in a neighborhood where everyone else drove to be a terrible, dehumanizing experience. We were such vulnerable bipeds, so exposed and isolated and open to abuse. Anyone could pelt us with a Wendy’s milkshake as they drove by. But then, I have always been sensitive to the white noise of whooshing traffic. If I were locked in a room with a recording of whooshing traffic playing twenty-four hours a day, I’d probably hang myself.
At the store, we purchased seven varieties of chips and four varieties of ice cream chocolate bars. I felt timid as I slid them across the counter. The gas station clerk knew. Those chips gave up my condition just like buying a pregnancy test would. We brought our food items back to John’s apartment. Now well-stocked, crunching on a Doritos Fiery Habanero-flavored rolled tortilla chip, I recalled a YA novel that I used to love where the protagonist, Hannah, finds a time portal and goes back in time to befriend a farm girl from the 1800s. Hannah has to live in the present day, but she returns frequently, each time smuggling back something modern, like a Coke, or bubble gum, or a transistor radio, to give to the farm girl. “Who’s the little devil in the box?” the farm girl asks as she gently shakes the transistor radio.
I too wanted a friend from the 1800s upon whom I could impress gifts from the future. What would I bring? How would I explain it? What would happen if she tasted this Doritos Fiery Habanero-flavored rolled tortilla chip—would she think she was being poisoned?
After an hour, Jeremy’s older brother, Matt, called Rachel. He and his wife, Minako, had just returned from the playground with their two kids and our two-year-old daughter. They were visiting from Japan and had rented a unit in John’s corporate apartment complex for the week. Matt and Minako were the only ones among us never to have smoked weed. Now that it was legal in Colorado, they wanted to try it. Earlier, Matt had been adamant that we smoke after we put the kids to bed. Matt was the patriarch of the family. He constantly hectored his parents for being passive. Sheeple, he called them—but then he became upset when his parents didn’t do what he told them to do. I was irritated that Matt was calling the shots even though it was Jeremy’s idea to buy the weed. And so, after he and Minako had left with the kids, we’d decided that we might as well get a head start.
Rachel got off the phone and said, “Matt’s not happy with us.”
The late-summer August afternoon stretched on interminably as our high drifted off our bodies like steam. Then Matt was there, annoyed. “Mom, you’re scaring the children! Can you stay away from them?” he told Rachel, who was sitting on the couch, plaiting my daughter’s hair. He kept badgering her, pointing out how strangely she was behaving, even though she was acting normal. By dinnertime, Rachel was near tears.
“Can you tell your brother to back off?” I asked Jeremy.
“If I say anything, he’ll be worse,” Jeremy said.
“Coward,” I said.
For dinner, we went to Tocabe, a Chipotle-style Native American restaurant where we waited in line and picked out the ground meat topping we wanted on our fry bread, which tasted like a fried hamburger bun. It was freezing in the restaurant. The AC must have been down to sixty. I held my daughter’s hand and noticed that it was cold. I told Jeremy that she and I were going to wait outside while everyone finished up. A quick burst of rain had washed away the day’s heat so it was a mild and pleasant room temperature outside. A crow alighted near us, and my daughter shouted pigeon pigeon as we sat on a bench. I looked out at the acres of rain-soaked parking lot and hulking big box stores, scanning for something else to hold my gaze. The architecture was like the massive Communist buildings I had seen in Beijing, which gave me the feeling a giant shoe was about to step on me.
Later that night, after we put the kids down, we passed around the vape again. Matt and Minako chose the edibles. “I don’t feel a thing,” Matt said. “Do you feel anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Minako said, and furrowed her brow.