Summary

The short story begins in prison with the anonymous first-person narrator’s “goodbye” (77) to the Kalamazoo river, which he validated as “real” (77), and someone named Jonnie Rae. The narrator, a former traveling meat-casing salesman, went eight years sober before falling back into addiction through prescribed muscle relaxers then Internet-obtained ketamine.

The narrator opened a mailbox in Illinois under the name Carl Gauss, a nineteenth-century astronomer. When his first order of ketamine arrived, he described the vials as “magical—cool and light and clear—a potion of possibilities” (80). He drove to the pharmacy to request “some syringes, please” (80) and received. Later that night back in his hotel room, he injected the drug and experienced his first high, transforming into “a glow contained in some sort of mechanized casket” (82) and feeling “[his] stomach tingled with the loss of gravity” (82).

In prison, the narrator noted his cell’s...