Plus it was also creepy that, when the face’s effulgence becomes the boiled white of the Trauma Wing ceiling as he comes up with a start up for air, the apparently real nondream Joelle van D. is leaning over the bed’s crib-railing, wetting Gately’s big forehead and horror-rounded lips with a cool cloth, wearing sweatpants and a sort of loose brocaded hulpil whose lavender almost matches the selvage on her clean veil. The hulpil’s neckline is too high for there to be much cleavage-action as she leans over him, which Gately regards as probably kind of a mercy. The two brownies Joelle’s got in her other hand (and her nails are bitten down to the ragged quick, just like Gately’s) she says she liberated from the nurses’ station and brought down for him, since Morris H. meant them for him and they’re by all just rights his. But she can see he’s in no shape to swallow, she says. She smells like peaches and cotton, and there’s a sweet evil whiff of the discount Canadian gaspers so many of the residents smoke, and underneath those smells Gately can detect that she’s got on a bit of perfume. 347
To amuse him she says ‘And Lo’ several times. Gately makes his chest go up and down rapidly to signify amusement. He declines either to moo or mew at her, out of embarrassment. Her veil this morning has a springy light-purple around the border, and the hair framing the veil seems a darker red, duskier, than when she’d first come into the House and refused meat. Gately hadn’t been much into WYYY or Madame Psychosis, but he’d sometimes run into people who were — Organics men, mostly, opium and brown heroin, terrible mulled wine — and he feels on top of the febrile pain and the creepiness of the amphetaminic-wraith- and Winston-Churchill-face-Joelle-and angelic-maternal-Death-Joelle-dreams an odd vividness in himself at being swabbed and maybe even generally admired by someone who’s an underground local intellectual-dash-art-type celebrity. He doesn’t know how to explain it, like as if the fact that she’s a public personage makes him feel somehow physically actuated, like more there -feeling, conscious of the way he’s holding his face, hesitant to make his barnyard sounds, even breathing through his nose so she won’t smell his unbrushed teeth. He feels self-conscious with her, Joelle can tell, but what’s admirable is he has no idea how heroic or even romantic he looks, unshaven and intubated, huge and helpless, wounded in service to somebody who did not deserve service, half out of his tree from pain and refusing narcotics. The last and pretty much only man Joelle ever let herself admire in a romantic way had left and wouldn’t even face up to why, instead erecting for himself a pathetic jealous fantasy about Joelle and his own poor father, whose only interest in Joelle had been first aesthetic and then anti-aesthetic.
Joelle doesn’t know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is (except maybe the fucking Crocodiles).
Joelle says she can’t stay long this time: all nonworking residents have to report for the House’s A.M. daily-meditation meeting, as Gately knows only too well. He isn’t sure what she means by ‘this time.’ She describes the newest male resident’s weird limbo-injury posture, and the way Johnette Foltz has to cut up this Dave guy’s supper and drop it into his open mouth bit by bit like a bird with a chick. Lifting her face to the ceiling makes the linen veil conform to the features of the face below, mouth open wide in imitation of a chick. The crewneckish hulpil makes her hair’s loose curls look dark and her wrists and hands look pale. Her hands’s skin is taut and freckled and treed with veins. His bed’s metal bars keep Gately’s rolling eyes from seeing anything much south of her thorax until Joelle finishes with the washcloth and retreats to the edge of the other bed, which at some point has become empty and the crying guy’s chart removed, and its crib-railings folded down, and she sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her legs, supporting one huarache’s heel on the railing’s joint, revealing she’s got on white socks under flesh-colored huaraches and ancient baggy old birch-colored sweatpants with B.U.M. down one leg, which Gately’s pretty sure he’s seen at the Sunday A.M. Big Book meeting on Ken Erdedy, and belong to Erdedy, and he feels a flash of something unpleasant that she’d be wearing the upscale kid’s pants. The A.M. light outside has gone from sunny yellow-white to now a kind of old-dime gray, with what looks like serious wind.
Joelle eats the cream-cheese brownies Gately can’t eat and works at pulling a kind of big notebookish thing out of her broad cloth purse. She talks about last night’s St. Columbkill’s 348 Meeting, where they’d all gone unsupervised because Johnette F. had to stay and keep an eye on Glynn who was sick and on Henderson and Willis, who were under legal quarantine upstairs. Gately racks his RAM for which fucking night St. Columbkill’s is. Joelle says how last night’s was St. Collie’s once-a-month format where instead of a Commitment they had that round-robin discussion where somebody in the hall spoke for five minutes and then picked the next speaker out of the hall’s crowd. There’d been a Kentuckian there, which Gately might recall she was from Kentucky? A Kentucky newcomer there, Wayne something, a real damaged-looking boy who hailed from the good old Blue Grass State but of late resided in a disconnected drainage pipe off a watershed facility down in the Allston Spur, he’d said. This guy, she said, said he was nineteen or thereabout, looked 40-some+, had clothes that looked to be decomposing on him even as he stood at the podium, had a ripe odor of drainage about him that produced hankies as far back as the fourth row, which he explained the odor by admitting his residential drainage pipe was in fact ‘mostly’ disconnected, like as in little-used. Joelle’s voice is nothing like the hollow resonant radio-voice and she uses her hands a lot to talk, trying to recreate the whole thing for Gately. Trying to give him a little bit of a meeting, Gately realizes, with a slight tight smile of disbelief that he can’t dredge up a mental meeting schedule so he’ll know what day this is.
Some of the St. Columbkillers were saying it was the longest single blackout they’d ever heard of. This Wayne fellow’d said he had no idea when, why or how he’d ended up so far up north as metro Boston ten years after his last memory. Most compelling, visually, Wayne had had a deep diagonal furrow in his face, extending from right eyebrow to left lip-corner — Joelle traces the length and angle with a ragged-nailed finger across her veil — splaying his nose and upper lip and rendering him so violently cross-eyed he seemed to address both corners of the front row at the same time. This old Wayne boy’d sketched how the facial dent — what Wayne had called ‘the Flaw,’ pointing at it like people might need help seeing what he was talking about — derived from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip of the post-binge Horrors and seeing subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne couldn’t tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day before, against the possibility of the Horrors. It had been just him and his Daddy and his Maw — ‘ “that was feeble” ’ — and 7.7 acres of chicken farm, Wayne had said. Wayne said the Flaw had just about healed up fine with fresh air and plenty of exercise when his Daddy, trying one Monday P.M. to get outside a late lunch of mush and syrup, up and clutched his skull, turned red and then blue and then purple, and died. Little Wayne had reportedly wiped the face clean of mush, dragged the dead body under the farmhouse porch, wrapped it in Purina Chicken-Chow sacks, and told his feeble Maw his Daddy had gone off to lay up drunk. The diagonal-dented kid had apparently then gone off to school as usual, done some discreet w.o.m. advertising, and had brought home with him a different set of boys each day for almost a week, charging them a fiveski a head to crawl under the porch and eyeball a bona fried dead man. Late Friday P.M., he recollected, he’d set off with hard currency to the billiard establishment where the niggers 349 that sold distilled Ball jars to his late Daddy was at, getting set to ‘ “lay up drunk as a cock on jimson.” ’ The next thing this Wayne boy says he knows, he wakes up in the partially d
isconnected NNE pipe, one millennial decade older and with some ‘ “right nasty” ’ medical issues the timer’s bell prevents him from sharing in detail.
And this old Wayne boy had up and pointed to Joelle to come speak next. ‘Almost as if he knew. As if he gut-intuited some sort of kinship, affinity of origin.’
Gately grunted softly to himself. He figured guys with ten-year blackouts who live in pipes probably didn’t have to much to go on besides your gut-type intuitions. He knew he needed to be reminded that this strange girl was only about three weeks clean and still leaching Substances out of her tissues and still utterly clueless, but he felt like he resented it whenever he got reminded. Joelle had the big flat book in her lap and was looking down at her thumb and flexing it, watching it flex. What was disconcerting was that when her head was down the veil hung loose at the same vertical angle as when her head was up, only now it was perfectly smooth and untextured, a smooth white screen with nothing behind it. A loudspeaker down the hall gave those xylophone dings that meant God knows what all the time.
When Joelle’s head came back up, the reassuring little hills and valleys of veiled features reappeared behind the screen. ‘I’m going to have to take off here in a second,’ she said. ‘I could come on back after, if you want. I can bring anything you think you’d like.’
Gately hiked an eyebrow at her, to get her to smile.
‘Hopefully since your fever went down they said they’ll decide you’re out of the woods and take that out, finally,’ Joelle said, looking at Gately’s mouth. ‘It’s got to hurt, and Pat said you’ll feel better when you can start quote sharing what you’re feeling.’
Gately hiked both eyebrows.
‘And you can tell me what you’d like brought. Who you’d want to have come. Whom.’
Moving his left arm north along his chest and throat to get the left hand up to feel at his mouth made the whole right side sing with pain. A skin-warmed plastic tube led in from the right side and was taped to his right cheek and went into his mouth and went down his throat past where his fingers could feel at the back of his mouth. He hadn’t been able to feel it in his mouth or going down the back of his throat to he didn’t want to know where, or even the tape on his cheek. He’d had like this like tube in his throat the whole time and hadn’t even known it. It had been in there so long by the time he came up for air he’d gotten like unconsciously used to it and hadn’t even known it was there. Maybe it was a feeding tube. The tube was probably why he could only mew and grunt. He probably didn’t have permanent voice damage. Thank God. He made his thoughts capitalized and Thanked God several times. He pictured himself at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention, off-handedly saying something that got an enormous laugh.
Either Joelle had some sort of problem with her thumb or she’d just got really interested in watching the thumb flex and twiddle. She was saying ‘It’s strange, not knowing it’s coming, then standing up there to speak. Folks you don’t know. Things I don’t realize I think til I say them. On the show I was used to knowing quite well what I thought before I spoke. This isn’t like that.’ She seemed to be addressing herself to the thumb. ‘I took a page from your manual and shared my complaint about the “But For the Grace of God,” and you were right, they just laughed. But I also… I hadn’t realized til I found myself telling them that I’d stopped seeing the “One Day at a Time” and “Keep It in the Day” as trite clichés. Patronizing.’ Gately noticed she still talks about Recovery-issues in a stiff proper intellectualish way she doesn’t talk about other stuff with. Her way of still keeping it all at arm’s length a little. A mental thumb to pretend to look at while she talks. It was all right; Gately’s own way of keeping it at arm’s length at the start had involved an actual arm. He pictured her laughing as he tells her that, the veil billowing mightily in and out. He smiled around the tube, which Joelle saw as encouragement. She said ‘And why Pat in counselling keeps telling me just to build a wall around each individual 24-hour period and not look over or back. And not to count days. Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up. In counselling I’d just smile and nod. Being polite. But standing up there last night, I didn’t even share it aloud, but I realized suddenly that this was why I’d never been able to stay off the stuff for more than a couple weeks. I’d always break down, go back. Freebase.’ She looks up at him. ‘I ’based, you know. You knew that. You all see the Intake forms.’
Gately smiles.
She said ‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliché warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.’ She cocked her head at him. ‘Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?’
Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below.
‘At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.’ Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. ‘But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.’ She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. ‘And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’
Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Malden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn’t deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.
But this inter-beat Present, this sense of endless Now — it had vanished in Revere Holding along with the heaves and chills. He’d returned to himself, moved to sit on the bunk’s edge, and ceased to Abide because he no longer had to.
His right side is past standing, but the hurt is nothing like the Bird’s hurt was. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward: Abiding again between heartbeats; tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it woul
d take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats. Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It’s a gift, the Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present.
‘And yet it wasn’t til that poor new pipe-fellow from home pointed at me and hauled me up there and I said it that I realized,’ Joelle said. ‘I don’t have to do it that way. I get to choose how to do it, and they’ll help me stick to the choice. I don’t think I’d realized before that I could — I can really do this. I can do this for one endless day. I can. Don.’
The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. If Gately got out of this, he decided, he was going to take the Knievel picture off his wall and mount it and give it to Joelle, and they’d laugh, and she’d call him Don or The Bimster, etc.
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