Acid and Opium

The body had to vanish, and Dorian Gray, who had never in his life performed a single ungraceful action, now required a corpse to be made graceful by absence. He thought of Alan Campbell once, the way one remembers a knife one lent long ago—useful, indifferent, sharp. Campbell had been a chemist of the first water, a man who parsed the world into equations and elegances, until Dorian had opened certain doors in him that gentlemen do not discuss afterward. The debt was old, but debts of that sort never settle; they merely wait, like a patient creditor in a dark hallway, to be called upon. Dorian wrote a letter in the hand of a man ordering flowers.

Campbell came. He was thinner than Dorian remembered, and the years had done what Dorian's years refused to do—slightly bent him, slightly grayed him. He listened to what was required of him, and his mouth made the shape of refusal before his mind did. But Dorian offered the only currency that purchases a man who has already lost himself: knowledge of the small, specific thing he had done years ago, in a room Dorian had furnished for him. The chemist's hands, which had once coaxed miracles from flasks, now trembled as though they understood what was being asked of them. He agreed. What followed, Dorian did not watch, because watching would have been a kind of complicity he was not yet ready to name, and so he stood in another room and listened to nothing at all, which is a sound more terrible than anything. The acid did its work, and the evening swallowed what was left. Campbell left without a word, and within a few weeks, in a laboratory of his own devising, opened a vein onto a floor that had only ever known the company of clean glass. One more name, then, for the ledger Dorian kept in a part of himself he refused to audit.

The remedy for what he had done was the oldest remedy in the pharmacopoeia of the well-dressed: oblivion by instalments. He drifted toward the river, toward the narrow streets where the lamps sweat and the air remembers the colonies. In the opulent squalor of an opium den, among sailors and broken actresses and the bruised dregs of empire, he sought the only companion that does not flinch at one's face—the poppy's patient, purple dream. He lay in a curtained stall and watched the smoke perform its slow calligraphy on the air. And there, in the half-light, a face from the old play of his life pushed through the curtains like a cue badly timed: James Vane, Sibyl's brother, the boy who had sworn, with the terrible simplicity of those who have nothing left, to avenge a sister whose name Dorian had not spoken in years. The man had grown harder, leaner, weathered into something resembling a blade left out in the rain. He stared. Dorian felt the recognition strike him like a physical thing, the way one feels a draftsman suddenly erase a long, careful line.

I must say, that, that, that, in fact, the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.