No, she screamed.
Shut up, said a man in a mask. Shut up, don’t you know you’re dead already?
She screamed again, and that scream was what finally woke her up. Her telephone was blinking. NEW TEXT MESSAGE, it said.
***
It was a snapshot of a bottle of pills. Blue ones. Oxys. One of her old loves. The pills were on a table in the foreground. Behind the bottle, Shannon could make out a refrigerator, a blur that might have been a window. She stared at the picture for a long, quiet moment—the words SENT FROM, followed by a string of digits that meant nothing—and swiped her thumb over the glass screen, left and right and left again, until she managed to make it go away.
Her first thought was that someone was fucking with her. She’d heard about stuff like this during rehab, stories about what happened when you tried to leave your low companions behind. One girl had a boyfriend who’d bring her a cup of coffee every morning, a needle and tourniquet and spoon and lighter beside it. The heroin would be in a sugar bowl, and all of it would be arranged on a tray, a hellish version of breakfast in bed. Another complained that her boyfriend had agreed to stop drinking in the house, but he’d go to the bars and come home reeking of cigarette smoke and Jack, which used to be her drink, and crawl into bed beside her, passing out, leaving her lying beside him slick with sweat, hands shaking, guts cramping, wanting it so badly that she could taste it.
Shannon had never been a drinker. Aside from strawberry wine coolers, which they’d probably kick you out of Brooklyn for drinking, she hated the taste of booze, the way it made her feel flushed and sweaty and sleepy. She was an opiate girl. She’d enjoyed pills in college and as an occasional treat when she was fresh out of school, trying to gain a toehold in the city’s literary scene, which felt to her like walking into a party where everyone knew everyone else already, where they all spoke the same language, a code you’d never crack made of shared references and in-jokes and nicknames and knowledge of the secret histories of institutions and people—who was sleeping with whom, who used to work with whose ex-wife, who used to be straight (or gay), whose career was on the rise and whose on the descent. Shannon had done her best, gamely submitting her stories and essays and résumés, papering her apartment’s bedroom walls with rejections. She’d done an internship at a literary quarterly, where her job consisted of sending form rejection letters to people just like her and fending off the advances of the editor, a man forty years her senior who’d been a finalist for the National Book Award years before. She kept writing and rewriting, sustained by the few words of praise and encouragement she had received, certain that she was both talented and determined, and that talent and determination would take her to where she wanted to go.
She was twenty-three and an editorial assistant at Paragon the first time she’d tried heroin. At first the drug had been a delightful treat, something she’d done with Mickey, her boyfriend, an options trader by day and bass player by night, in a Brooklyn band that was starting to get some buzz on the blogs. Mickey was a year younger than she was, all clear eyes and shiny hair and exclamation-mark-peppered texts. His mouth tasted as sweet as a peach, but ultimately she’d found all of that boyish enthusiasm, not to mention his easily found success, a little tiresome. She had never loved Mickey. Only the drugs.
So they’d drifted apart, and then Shannon lost her job after calling in sick or showing up late or spending forty-five minutes nodding out in the ladies’ room a few times too many. Things had gone downhill fast, so damned fast she still couldn’t believe it. Blink and you’re collecting your diploma—summa cum laude, if you please—on a perfect June afternoon. Blink and you’re snorting from a little bag of brownish powder someone pulled out of his pocket at a party. Blink and someone named Money is teaching you how to tie off, sliding a needle into your vein, murmuring Express train to happy. Blink and you’re stealing gold coins out of a shoebox in your parents’ closet while they set the table for Christmas dinner. Blink and you’re in rehab, out of rehab, in rehab again. Blink and you’re letting a guy flip you facedown on a stained futon, listening to him and his friends joke about playing the B side, focusing on the one, two, three, four bags on the table that will take you away from all of this, because you are nothing. Don’t you know you’re dead already?
The phone was still in her hand. She gave a little screech when a text from a string of numbers that meant nothing to her appeared on the screen: Dude U redE 2 partE? Bcuz she’s all redE for U!
She turned her phone off and put it in her purse, handling it by its edges, as if it were a grenade. There was a meeting at St. Patrick’s at nine o’clock. She went to it, and when the leader said it was time for anyone who wanted to share, she put her hand in the air. I have no life, she would tell them. There is no one who knows I’m alive. Someone is sending me pictures of pills on my new phone. I am scared. I am alone. I don’t think I can do this. But she didn’t get called on, so she put four doughnuts in her pockets, two on each side, like ballast, and then went back to the T-Mobile store.
***
“Easy explanation,” said Devonté when Shannon showed him the text and the picture. “You’re getting texts for someone who used to have your phone number.”
“So I’m gonna get all this guy’s texts and messages?”
“Hopefully he gave his bros his new number. Let me see something.” He took her phone, pressed a few buttons, wrote something down, then scooted his wheeled chair over to a computer screen, and tapped and peered and tapped some more. She caught a muttered “That’s weird” as she drifted to the display of customized cases and high-end headphones. There were exactly three limp dollar bills in her pocket. She’d had four, but she’d put one in the basket that morning.
Devonté beckoned her over. “If someone had this number before you got it, he had it marked private. No way to find out who it is.”
“How about where it is?”
He shook his head. “Two sixty-three is one of the new area codes. They’re using it all over New York. You want my advice, just ignore it. Eventually whoever’s texting will figure out that you’re not their friend.”
“I could text him back and tell him that.”
“You could,” said Devonté, drawing out the last word. He put his hands against his head and used his fingertips to massage his scalp. “Sometimes people are real assholes when it’s just texts or messages. If whoever’s sending the messages knows that he’s bugging you, he might, you know, raise the stakes.”
Shannon frowned.
“Think of it as a window into someone else’s world,” he said.
“It feels like I’m eavesdropping.” She remembered something from Chaucer: Peep not at a keyhole, lest ye be vexed.
“It’s a nuisance,” Devonté said, “but I guarantee, it’ll stop after a few days.”
“As long as it’s not costing me anything.”
“To receive texts? Nope. You’ve got the unlimited data plan, remember? You can send and receive all the texts you want. Go ahead,” he said, and pushed the phone across the counter. “Send a text.”
She bit her lip and wondered if he’d looked at her contacts, a list that was still only two names long. She slid her finger over the screen, clicked on Devonté’s name, and wrote, “Hi.” In his breast pocket, his phone shuddered and buzzed. “See?” he said, without even reading what she’d written. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
***
The man leading the Night Owls meeting, at eleven o’clock in a meeting room at Roosevelt Hospital, had terminal brain cancer. He had a square white bandage over one cheek, and the backs of both hands were mottled black and blue. His white hair hovered around his bald scalp like milkweed fluff. His body seemed to float in his clothes. “I’m not going to sit here and say that I’m happy to be dying,” he said. “But I’m glad I’m dying sober. I’m glad I can be there for my wife and my kids, and that I’m not
in a fog. I can hear it when they tell me they love me, and I can mean it when I say it back.” He gazed around the room—there were only eight of them—making meaningful eye contact with each one, lingering on Shannon. Shannon slipped out back when she felt her phone buzzing in her hip pocket. Another text from that string of unfamiliar numbers: Dude. Get here. This party is EPIC.
“Epic,” she said, and shook her head. In high school, she’d played quarters on Ping-Pong tables in basements while parents watched The X-Files upstairs. She’d get one of her cross-country teammates, who had an obliging older brother, to buy her a bottle of peach schnapps, and she’d mix it with orange juice, thinking she was sophisticated because she preferred that to beer. Once, during a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven, a boy named John Mackey had gotten so frustrated trying to unhook her bra that he’d yanked the hooks right off. She’d laughed. They both had. It had been funny. More than that, it had been safe, because someone was on the outside of the door to call “Time!” and more someones were waiting there to laugh at their flushed faces. Torn clothes were a joke; the idea of a guy getting rough, using force, actually hurting a girl he knew, that was a joke, too.
She slipped out the door and went to a crowded Starbucks, where she lingered by the pickup counter until there were four drinks piled up and nobody paying much attention. Then she helped herself to the tallest one and calmly walked out the door to wait for the train that would take her home. She was thinking of her mother. “I don’t know what to do for you anymore!” her mom had cried. This had been on Family Day, two rehabs ago, the place in California. “It’s like you’re drowning, and I keep throwing you life preservers, and you keep not grabbing them, and Shannie, I can’t . . .” Shannon had wanted to tell her she was sorry, but then her mother, still crying, had said, “You were so talented!” and Shannon felt such deep shame, such embarrassment that all of her early promise had bled out without netting her a book deal or a contract with a good magazine or even a real job, that she’d said “Fuck you” instead of “I’m sorry” and stormed out of the room where the families had gathered. She had slammed the door behind her, but not fast enough to shut out the sound of one of the counselors saying, “That’s her disease talking. That’s not your daughter.”
***
Instead of waiting for the train, Shannon walked home from the meeting, trying to tire herself out, but that night she couldn’t sleep. Big surprise. “You’ve messed up your body’s natural sleep cycle, taking all that heroin,” they’d told her. So when would she sleep again? Would it be weeks, months, years? Nobody knew, or at least nobody wanted to tell her.
She tried every meditation technique she’d learned, controlling her breathing, flexing and relaxing all her muscles. It wasn’t until she reached for a pen, thinking she’d start the journal they’d all told her to keep, that she saw her phone’s message light blinking.
There was one new message. Shannon could taste copper in her mouth as the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clicked, and there was another picture.
This time she saw a man and a girl sitting shoulder to shoulder on a couch. The man wore an untucked plaid shirt and jeans. His thick legs were spread wide, and his body was angled toward his couch-mate. Underneath the brim of his baseball cap, he was grinning. One of his arms was around the girl’s shoulders. He was using his free hand to squeeze her breast.
As for the girl, she looked young and either very drunk or ill. Her eyes were half open, unfocused. Her mouth hung slack, and her head tilted forward, chin almost touching her chest, as if she were a baby who’d fallen asleep in a stroller. The skin of her face and throat was pasty, and she appeared entirely unaware that the guy sitting beside her was pawing at her. She didn’t look as though she was aware of anything.
You know where that is, said the voice in her mind.
I do not, said Shannon. She lay back on her bed. She tried to close her eyes. She thought, Why does this have to be my job? Haven’t I been through enough? She made herself breathe, inhaling to the count of five, exhaling over the same count, until she’d lulled herself into sleep, or something close.
***
After the party was the after-party. This meant smoking meth off squares of burnt tinfoil in someone’s grotty apartment, where the only furniture was milk crates and two splintered wooden chairs. She had been sick before the night had even started. It had been twelve hours since she’d shot her last four bags, certain that Mickey was going to bring her more, only Mickey had shown up without her two hundred dollars and with some long story about how his connection had never showed.
“I need something,” Shannon had said, hating the words as they came out of her mouth, hating herself for letting it get this far again. She’d promised that she’d keep it under control, just on weekends, and if not just weekends, then just night, but of course life had happened, and three weeks later she was right back where she’d started. Mickey had given her a bottle of brandy and she’d clutched it close, like a baby, choking down burning sips and hoping it would be enough to stop the sweating and the shaking, the way her legs wanted to kick and her organs felt unmoored, as if they were all sloshing around inside her, waiting to come streaming out of her mouth or points south.
The booze hadn’t helped and the meth hadn’t, either. She’d endured the agony for as long as she could before gripping Mickey’s hand with one of her sweat-slimy paws and saying, “You’ve got to get me something.”
They’d piled into someone’s Citicar, and there was rap music on the stereo, four people crammed into the tiny backseat. She’d huddled close to Mickey, shivering and ill, and they’d driven for almost an hour, finally ending up in front of an abandoned rowhouse at the end of a burnt-out block.
Shannon remembered an upside-down Big Wheel on the porch and two aluminum-tube lawn chairs with sagging nylon straps. In the kitchen, all of the appliances had been yanked out of the walls, leaving stained squares and rectangles to indicate their locations. “This way,” said Mickey, leading her down a steep flight of stairs, down to a basement that smelled like rotting potatoes and stale sweat and the chemical reek of crack. She’d been half sitting, half lying on a couch that smelled like mold and mothballs when she’d first noticed the noise, a faint scratching sound. “Mickey?” she’d whispered, but Mickey wasn’t there, he was on another couch all the way across the room with three other guys, laughing about something. Shannon had pushed herself to her feet and had started across the room, toward the scratching sound, when suddenly there was an arm around her waist, the moist warmth of a guy’s horrible breath blooming against her neck and ear. “Not there, baby, that’s not for you.” Like a good girl, she’d let him lead her away from the wall, and he’d found her pills and she’d paid for them on her back, eyes squeezed shut, tears running into the cups of her ears and turning the scratching into an underwater rumor, faint and far away.
***
In her little room, in her sheetless, blanketless futon, Shannon sat upright, gasping. “No,” she said. “No.” Her phone light was blinking, blinking, and she knew what it would say. She threw the phone across the room and groaned out loud, burying her face in her hands. She thought, Take this cup from my lips. She thought, I was only there once and I was sick. I’ll probably never be able to remember where it is. She thought, Probably she’s dead already.
But you couldn’t run forever. They had told her that in rehab, too. Eventually you had to stop running, and even the worst failures, the true fuckups and wastes of space, had to try to fix what they had broken. You had to turn and see what you had done. You had to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. You had to write it all down and confess the nature of your wrongdoings to yourself and to the God of your understanding and to someone else, and then you had to make amends.
“Okay, fine,” said Shannon. Her eyes felt wide and starey. Underneath them, her cheeks were slick. She rubbed at the tears, push
ed her feet into her cheap sneakers, and then went and retrieved the phone, holding it gently in her hand, forcing herself to think.
She could go to the cops . . . except what would she tell them? She had a few texts that wouldn’t strike them as alarming, a picture that showed nothing more than a boy and a girl, both upright and clothed. Maybe he’s her boyfriend, she heard an imaginary police officer say. She could tell them that the texts and pictures reminded her of a house where she’d been, and how there’d been a scratching sound, maybe nothing more than a mouse behind the wall, but maybe something bigger . . . except that would prompt all kinds of questions about exactly what she, Shannon Elizabeth Wills, had been doing in the house and why she hadn’t said anything to anyone at the time and why she was only now, eight weeks later, coming forward. Rehab, huh? Not working yet? They’d ask their fake-casual questions, taking in her scrawny limbs and messed-up face, roll their eyes over her head if she tried to tell them about her dream—the men in masks, the hands on her ankles.
The phone buzzed in her hand. Feeling like she was in a dream, underwater, Shannon picked it up and clicked “Read text” and stared at the screen as the words she’d known were coming appeared one letter at a time.
HELP ME.
Then, as she watched, the screen filled with the words until the picture was obliterated. HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME.
She hit buttons at random until the words went away. Then she called Devonté.
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