《渺小一生》:今天星期五，是第一天
THE LAST TIME JB tried—really tried—to stop doing drugs, it was Fourth of July weekend. No one else was in the city. Malcolm was with Sophie visiting her parents in Hamburg. Jude was with Harold and Julia in Copenhagen. Willem was shooting in Cappadocia. Richard was in Wyoming, at an artists’ colony. Asian Henry Young was in Reykjavík. Only he remained, and if he hadn’t been so determined, he wouldn’t have been in town, either. He’d have been in Beacon, where Richard had a house, or in Quogue, where Ezra had a house, or in Woodstock, where Ali had a house, or—well. There weren’t that many other people who would give him their house nowadays, and besides, he wasn’t talking to most of them because they were getting on his nerves. But he hated summer in New York. All fat people hated summer in New York: everything was always sticking to everything else, flesh to flesh, flesh to fabric. You never felt truly dry. And yet there he was, unlocking the door of his studio on the third floor of the white brick building in Kensington, glancing involuntarily toward the end of the hall, where Jackson’s studio was, before he let himself in.
上回杰比尝试停止嗑药（真正努力尝试），是七月四日国庆节的那个周末。其他人都不在纽约市。马尔科姆陪苏菲去德国汉堡拜访父母，裘德陪哈罗德和朱丽娅去丹麦哥本哈根，威廉正在土耳其的卡帕多西亚地区拍戏，理查德去了怀俄明州的一个艺术村，亚洲亨利·杨在冰岛的雷克雅未克。只有他留下来，要不是他这么坚定，他也会离开。他会去纽约州的比肯市，理查德在那有一栋房子，或者去长岛南岸的阔克村，埃兹拉在那有一栋房子，或者去纽约州的伍德斯托克，阿里在那有一栋房子，或者——算了，现在其他人不太会把房子借给他住了，何况他跟大部分人都不来往了，因为他们搞得他很烦。但他讨厌纽约的夏天。所有胖子都讨厌纽约的夏天：每样东西都黏在其他东西上，肉黏着肉，肉黏着布料，你从来不会真的觉得干爽。然而，他来到布鲁克林区肯辛顿一栋白色砖砌楼房三楼的工作室，打开前门的锁，不由自主地朝走廊尽头杰克逊的工作室瞥了一眼，这才进了门。
JB was not an addict. Yes, he did drugs. Yes, he did a lot of them. But he wasn’t an addict. Other people were addicts. Jackson was an addict. So was Zane, and so was Hera. Massimo and Topher: also addicts. Sometimes it felt like he was the only one who hadn’t slipped over the edge.
他没有药瘾。没错，他嗑药。没错，他嗑很多，但他没上瘾。其他人都上瘾了。杰克逊就是一个，还有赞恩，还有埃拉。马西摩和托佛也都上瘾了。有时他感觉他是唯一还没越界掉下去的人。
And yet he knew that a lot of people thought he had, which is why he was still in the city when he should be in the country: four days, no drugs, only work—and then no one would be able to say anything ever again.
但是他知道很多人都以为他上瘾了。这就是为什么他该去乡下的时候却偏偏待在纽约：四天，不嗑药，只工作，这样就没有人敢再啰唆了。
Today, Friday, was day one. The air-conditioning unit in his studio was broken, so the first thing he did was open all the windows and then, once he had knocked, lightly, on Jackson’s door to make sure he wasn’t inside, the door as well. Normally he never opened the door, both because of Jackson and because of the noise. His studio was one of fourteen rooms on the third floor of a five-story building. The rooms were meant to be used only as studio space, but he guessed about twenty percent of the building’s occupants actually lived there illegally. On the rare occasions he had arrived at his studio before ten in the morning, he would see people shuffling through the corridors in their boxers, and when he went to the bathroom at the end of the hall, there’d be someone in there taking a sponge bath in the sink or shaving or brushing his teeth, and he’d nod at them—“Whassup, man?”—and they’d nod back. Sadly, however, the overall effect was less collegiate and more institutional. This depressed him. JB could have found studio space elsewhere, better, more private studio space, but he’d taken this one because (he was embarrassed to admit) the building looked like a dormitory, and he hoped it might feel like college again. But it didn’t.
今天星期五，是第一天。他工作室的冷气坏了，所以他进门的第一件事就是打开所有窗子，然后出去轻轻敲了一下杰克逊的门，确定他不在之后，把自己工作室的门也打开。平常他从不开门，既是因为杰克逊，也是因为噪音。他的工作室是这栋五层楼房三楼的十四个房间中的一个。这些房间本来只能当成工作室使用，但他猜想，整栋楼大概有百分之二十的人其实都在这里非法居住。他偶尔在早上10点前抵达工作室时，会看到有人穿着四角内裤在走廊上拖着脚步走动，而且去大厅尽头的洗手间时，有人会在那里的水槽擦澡、刮胡子或是刷牙。他会跟他们点个头，对方也会点头响应一下。然而悲惨的是，那整体的效果不像大学，而像监狱。这让他很沮丧。杰比大可在别处找到更好、更有隐私的工作室，但他选中这里，是因为（他都不好意思承认）这栋楼看起来像宿舍，而他希望它能给他重回大学时代的感觉。但结果并没有。
The building was also supposed to be a “low noise density” site, whatever that meant, but along with the artists, a number of bands—ironic thrasher bands, ironic folk bands, ironic acoustic bands—had also rented studios there, which meant that the hallway was always jumbled with noise, all of the bands’ instruments melding together to make one long whine of guitar feedback. The bands weren’t supposed to be there, and once every few months, when the owner of the building, a Mr. Chen, stopped by for a surprise inspection, he would hear the shouts bouncing through the hallways, even through his closed door, each person’s call of alarm echoed by the next, until the warning had saturated all five floors—“Chen!” “Chen!” “Chen!”—so by the time Mr. Chen stepped inside the front door, all was quiet, so unnaturally quiet that he imagined he could hear his next-door neighbor grinding his inks against his whetstone, and his other neighbor’s spirograph skritching against canvas. And then Mr. Chen would get into his car and drive away, and the echoes would reverse themselves—“Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!”—and the cacophony would rise up again, like a flock of screeching cicadas.
这栋楼房同时应该属于“低噪音密度”（管他是什么意思）的区域，但除了艺术家之外，还有很多乐团也租了这里的工作室，包括很烂的鞭击金属乐团、很烂的民谣乐团、很烂的不插电乐团。所有的乐器声混合成一种吉他试音时的噪音所发出的漫长哀鸣。那些乐团不该在这里的。所以每隔几个月，屋主陈先生过来突击检查时，他就会听到走廊里回荡着叫喊声，连关着门都听得到。每个人奔走相告，直到五层楼全充满了“陈！”“陈！”“陈！”的警告，所以等到陈先生走进楼下大门时，整栋楼一片寂静，不自然得让他想象可以听到隔壁邻居的刀摩擦着磨刀石的声音，还有另一边邻居的万花尺在画布上刮出轻轻的刮擦声。然后陈先生会回到他的车上，离开，于是相应的呼喊声此起彼落，“解除！”“解除！”“解除！”不和谐的乐器噪音再度响起，像聒噪的蝉鸣。
Once he was certain he was alone on the floor (god, where was everyone? Was he truly the last person left on earth?), he took off his shirt and then, after a moment, his pants, and began cleaning his studio, which he hadn’t done in months. Back and forth he walked to the trash cans near the service elevator, stuffing them full of old pizza boxes and empty beer cans and scraps of paper with doodles on them and brushes whose bristles had gone strawlike because he hadn’t cleaned them and palettes of watercolors that had turned to clay because he hadn’t kept them moist.
一旦他确定这层楼只有他一个人（老天，大家都跑哪里去了，地球上真的只剩下他了吗？），他就脱掉衬衫，过了一会儿，又脱掉长裤，开始收拾好几个月没打扫的工作室。他一趟又一趟地走到货运电梯旁的垃圾桶，在里头塞满披萨盒、空啤酒罐、乱涂画过的碎纸张、笔毛因没清洗而硬得像干草的画笔，还有荒废已久、颜料硬得像黏土的水彩调色盘。
Cleaning was boring; it was particularly boring while sober. He reflected, as he sometimes did, that none of the supposedly good things that were supposed to happen to you when you were on meth had happened to him. Other people he knew had grown gaunt, or had nonstop anonymous sex, or had binges in which they cleaned or organized their apartments or studios for hours. But he remained fat. His sex drive had vanished. His studio and apartment remained disasters. True, he was working remarkably long stretches—twelve, fourteen hours at a time—but he couldn’t attribute that to the meth: he had always been a hard worker. When it came to painting or drawing, he had always had a long attention span.
打扫很无聊，清醒时打扫尤其无聊。于是就像他有时会做的那样，他认真想着吸冰毒时那些应该发生在他身上，但结果全没发生的美好事情。他认识的其他人吸了冰毒后都消瘦了，他们不停地跟陌生人性交，或者连续打扫、整理公寓，或者在工作室干上好几个小时。但他还是很胖，他的性交欲望消失了，他的工作室和公寓还是一塌糊涂。没错，因为他总是一口气工作很久（每次十二三小时），但不是因为冰毒的关系，而是因为他工作向来努力。只要是绘画或素描，他总是可以保持长时间的专注。
After an hour or so of picking things up, the studio looked exactly the same as it had when he began, and he was craving a cigarette, which he didn’t have, or a drink, which he also didn’t have, and shouldn’t have anyway, as it was still only noon. He knew he had a ball of gum in his jeans pocket, which he dug around for and found—it was slightly damp from the heat—and stuffed into his mouth, chewing it as he lay supine, his eyes closed, the cement floor cool beneath his back and thighs, pretending he was elsewhere, not in Brooklyn in July in the ninety-degree heat.
收拾了约一个小时后，工作室看起来还是跟他刚进门时没两样。他好想抽根烟，但是他没烟，或是喝点酒，但是他没酒，也不该有，现在只是中午而已。他知道牛仔裤口袋里有一颗口香糖球，于是翻找出因为天热而变得有点潮湿的口香糖，塞进嘴里，躺在那咀嚼着，闭上双眼。他背部和大腿底下的水泥地凉凉的，他假装自己在别的地方，而不是在布鲁克林三十二摄氏度的七月天。
How am I feeling? he asked himself.
我现在觉得怎么样？他问自己。
Okay, he answered himself.
还好，他回答自己。
The shrink he had started seeing had told him to ask himself that. “It’s like a soundcheck,” he’d said. “Just a way to check in with yourself: How am I feeling? Do I want to use? If I do want to use, why do I want to use? It’s a way for you to communicate with yourself, to examine your impulses instead of simply giving in to them.” What a moron, JB had thought. He still thought this. And yet, like many moronic things, he was unable to expunge the question from his memory. Now, at odd, unwelcome moments, he would find himself asking himself how he felt. Sometimes, the answer was, “Like I want to do drugs,” and so he’d do them, if only to illustrate to his therapist just how moronic his method was. See? he’d say to Giles in his head, Giles who wasn’t even a PhD, just an MSW. So much for your self-examination theory. What else, Giles? What’s next?
他开始看的那个心理咨询师曾要他这样问自己。“就像是音响的试音。”他曾说，“只是检查自己的方式：我现在觉得怎么样？我想嗑药吗？如果我想，那是为什么？你可以用这个方式跟自己沟通，分析一下你的冲动，而不是投降算了。”真够智障的，杰比当时心想。他现在还是这么想。然而就像很多智障的事情一样，他没法把这问题从记忆中抹去。现在，偶尔碰到一些讨厌的时刻，他会不自觉地问自己感觉怎么样。有时答案是：“觉得想嗑药。”于是他就嗑了，即使只为了向那个心理咨询师证明他的方法有多智障。看到没？他在心里跟他的心理咨询师贾尔思说。贾尔思还不是医学博士呢，只是社工硕士。你的自我检验理论就这么点用。接下来呢，贾尔思你还有什么招数？
Seeing Giles had not been JB’s idea. Six months ago, in January, his mother and aunts had had a mini-intervention with him, which had begun with his mother sharing memories of what a bright and precocious boy JB had been, and look at him now, and then his aunt Christine, literally playing bad cop, yelling at him about how he was wasting all the opportunities that her sister had provided him and how he had become a huge pain in the ass, and then his aunt Silvia, who had always been the gentlest of the three, reminding him that he was so talented, and that they all wanted him back, and wouldn’t he consider getting treatment? He had not been in the mood for an intervention, even one as low-key and cozy as theirs had been (his mother had provided his favorite cheesecake, which they all ate as they discussed his flaws), because, among other things, he was still angry at them. The month before, his grandmother had died, and his mother had taken a whole day to call him. She claimed it was because she couldn’t find him and he wasn’t picking up his phone, but he knew that the day she had died he had been sober, and his phone had been on all day, and so he wasn’t sure why his mother was lying to him.
去看贾尔思不是杰比自愿的。六个月前，一月的时候，他母亲和阿姨们对他采取了小型的干预行动，一开始是他母亲说起杰比以前是个多开朗又早熟的孩子，结果看看他现在变成什么样。然后，他的亲阿姨克丽丝汀名副其实地扮演起了坏警察，朝他大吼说他如何浪费了她姐姐给他提供的所有机会，还有他怎么变成一个超级讨厌鬼，接着三人中向来最温和的席薇亚阿姨提醒他，说他这么有才华，她们都希望他回头，而且他不考虑去治疗吗？他当时没有接受干预的心情，即便是这么温和又令人舒适的干预（他母亲还做了他最喜欢的奶酪蛋糕，大家边吃边讨论他的缺点），因为除了其他事情之外，他还在生她们的气。前一个月，他外婆过世了，他母亲花了一整天打电话给他。她宣称找不到他是因为他不接电话。但他知道外婆过世的那一天他没嗑药，他的手机也一整天开着，所以他不确定母亲为什么要撒谎。
“JB, Grandma would have been heartbroken if she knew what you’ve become,” his mother said to him.
“杰比，外婆要是知道你变成这样，一定会伤心死。”他母亲这么告诉他。
“God, Ma, just fuck off,” he’d said, wearily, sick of her wailing and quivering, and Christine had popped up and slapped him across the face.
“老天，妈，滚蛋啦。”他厌倦地说，受不了她这样哭得全身打战，结果克丽丝汀冲过来甩了他一巴掌。
After that, he’d agreed to go see Giles (some friend of a friend of Silvia’s) as a way of apologizing to Christine and, of course, to his mother. Unfortunately, Giles truly was an idiot, and during their sessions (paid for by his mother: he wasn’t going to waste his money on therapy, especially bad therapy), he would answer Giles’s uninventive questions—Why do you think you’re so attracted to drugs, JB? What do you feel they give you? Why do you think your use of them has accelerated so much over the past few years? Why do you think you’re not talking to Malcolm and Jude and Willem as much?—with answers he knew would excite him. He would slip in mentions of his dead father, of the great emptiness and sense of loss his absence had inspired in him, of the shallowness of the art world, of his fears that he would never fulfill his promise, and watch Giles’s pen bob ecstatically over his pad, and feel both disdain for stupid Giles as well as disgust for his own immaturity. Fucking with one’s therapist—even if one’s therapist truly deserved to be fucked with—was the sort of thing you did when you were nineteen, not when you were thirty-nine.
之后，他就同意去看贾尔思（是席薇亚一个朋友的朋友），算是跟克丽丝汀和他母亲道歉。不幸的是，贾尔思真是个白痴，而且每次去做心理咨询（由他母亲出钱，他才不要把钱浪费在心理咨询上头，尤其是烂的咨询），他就要回答贾尔思各式各样了无新意的问题，而且知道自己的答案一定会让他很兴奋——杰比，为什么你觉得自己这么受药物吸引？你觉得药物给了你什么？你觉得为什么过去短短几年你嗑药嗑得这么凶？你觉得你为什么不像以前那样常跟马尔科姆、裘德和威廉谈话？他会故意提到死去的父亲，提到父亲缺席引发了巨大的空虚感和失落感，谈到艺术圈的肤浅，谈到他担心自己永远无法出人头地的恐惧，然后看着贾尔思在笔记本上狂写。他既瞧不起贾尔思的愚蠢，也觉得自己的幼稚令人作呕。恶搞心理咨询师（即使是个活该被恶搞的咨询师）这种事，是你19岁的时候才会干的，不是39岁。
But although Giles was an idiot, JB did find himself thinking about his questions, because they were questions that he had asked himself as well. And although Giles posed each as a discrete quandary, he knew that in reality each one was inseparable from the last, and that if it had been grammatically and linguistically possible to ask all of them together in one big question, then that would be the truest expression of why he was where he was.
尽管贾尔思是白痴，但杰比发现自己真的会思考他问的那些问题，因为那些问题他也问过自己。尽管贾尔思提出的每个问题像是各自独立的，但他知道其实每个问题都跟上一个有关。如果有可能在文法上和语言学上把所有问题融合成一个大问题，就能真正表明他为什么会是现在这个样子。
First, he’d say to Giles, he hadn’t set out to like drugs as much as he did. That sounded like an obvious and even silly thing to say, but the truth was that JB knew people—mostly rich, mostly white, mostly boring, mostly unloved by their parents—who had in fact started taking drugs because they thought it might make them more interesting, or more frightening, or more commanding of attention, or simply because it made the time go faster. His friend Jackson, for example, was one of those people. But he was not. Of course, he had always done drugs—everyone had—but in college, and in his twenties, he had thought of drugs the way he thought of desserts, which he also loved: a consumable that had been forbidden to him as a child and which was now freely available. Doing drugs, like having post-dinner snacks of cereal so throat-singeingly sweet that the leftover milk in the bowl could be slurped down like sugarcane juice, was a privilege of adulthood, one he intended to enjoy.
关于第一个问题，他会跟贾尔思说，他一开始没那么喜欢嗑药。这种话听起来好像很显而易见，甚至很傻气，但事实上，杰比知道很多人（大都很有钱，白人，觉得生活无聊，不受父母疼爱）一开始会嗑药，就是因为他们以为药物能让自己变得更有趣、更令人畏惧、更引人注意，或只是因为药物能让时间过得更快。比如，他的朋友杰克逊就是这种人，但他不是。当然，他向来会嗑药，每个人都会，但在大学时代、二十来岁时，药物之于他就跟甜点一样（他也很喜欢甜点），是他小时候不被允许接触的一种消耗品，但现在他可以任意取用了。嗑药就像晚餐后吃谷物片泡牛奶一样，虽然喉咙会甜得发干，但仍可以像喝甘蔗汁一样把碗里剩下的牛奶啜饮而尽，这是身为成人的特权，也是他打算好好享受的。
Questions two and three: When and why had drugs become so important to him? He knew the answers to those as well. When he was thirty-two, he’d had his first show. Two things had happened after that show: The first was that he had become, genuinely, a star. There were articles written about him in the art press, and articles written about him in magazines and newspapers read by people who wouldn’t know their Sue Williams from their Sue Coe. And the second was that his friendship with Jude and Willem had been ruined.
问题二和问题三：药物什么时候变得这么重要？为什么？他也知道答案。那时他32岁，开了第一次个展。展览后发生了两件事：第一件是他真的变成明星了，不但艺术媒体上有写他的文章，连一般的非艺术读者看的杂志和报纸也有关于他的报道。第二件就是他跟裘德和威廉的友谊毁了。
Perhaps “ruined” was too strong a word. But it had changed. He had done something bad—he could admit it—and Willem had taken Jude’s side (and why should he have been surprised at all that Willem had taken Jude’s side, because really, when he reviewed their entire friendship, there was the evidence: time after time after time of Willem always taking Jude’s side), and although they both said they forgave him, something had shifted in their relationship. The two of them, Jude and Willem, had become their own unit, united against everyone, united against him (why had he never seen this before?): We two form a multitude. And yet he had always thought that he and Willem had been a unit.
或许“毁”这个字眼太强烈了，但总之是变了。他承认自己做了很不好的事，威廉站到了裘德那一边（关于这一点，他为什么要觉得惊讶？回顾他们的友谊，事实早就一再证明：威廉总是一次又一次地站在裘德那一边）。就算后来他们都说原谅他，但他们的关系起了根本的改变。裘德和威廉两个人自成一组，联合起来对抗其他人，甚至对抗他（为什么他以前都没看出来）：我们两人同心协力。然而，他一直以为他和威廉才是一组。
But all right, they weren’t. So who was he left with? Not Malcolm, because Malcolm had eventually started dating Sophie, and they made their own unit. And so who would be his partner, who would make his unit? No one, it often seemed. They had abandoned him.
好吧，结果不是。那他还能跟谁一组呢？不会是马尔科姆，因为马尔科姆后来开始跟苏菲交往，他们自成一组了。那么谁是他的伙伴？谁会跟他一组？没有人，看起来往往就是这样。他们抛弃了他。
