Hope seemed to know he did not mean the savages who had done the damage at their feet. She seemed to know he was thinking of the damage in a different jungle, years ago and far away. She said, “No, they never fell at all.”
Riley’s weak eyes lost their focus for a moment, looking past the stones and broken glass on the kitchen floor, seeing himself in another shattered world, assuming the worst about Waytee and the others. How he wished he could apologize. He said, “I miss them all so much.”
“No need. They’re waiting for us, and we’ll be there soon enough.”
Riley smiled.
Hope and Riley Keep slept in the same bed that night, holding hands. On Saturday, with Bree helping, Riley began replacing windows at Hope’s house— their house. He was strong enough, but more than once he had to pause until a fit of shaking passed, and no food he ate could fill the constant emptiness within. Each time the urge began to spread beyond his boundaries, Riley thought of thorns and crosses and he confessed his rediscovered weakness with a whispered, “Rescue me.”
He was empty, and it made him weightless, and he prayed with all his heart to be like that until the day he died.
Sunday came, his first full week of true sobriety complete. The Keeps arrived at church together, the alcoholic with his crippled wife and pregnant daughter, and they did not stop in back but helped each other to a pew up near the front, where a beaming Henry Reardon watched as Riley sat with Hope and Bree, who were not just inside Riley’s head anymore but lived real lives out beyond him now, seeing real things and breathing true air, on his left and on his right, singing ancient hymns. Nothing pressed him down. He thought of sunrises on the Atlantic and the harbor at the center of his hometown and bridal gowns and belated christenings in that very place where he was sitting. He savored the familiar lofty space above him, the firmness of the pew beneath him, the smells and sounds and dimly recognized people, and a loving wife and child who lived in total independence of his fantasies. Nothing of consequence outside of Riley Keep had changed. He was still addicted to his sins. He could still go from mourning for his friend and longing for his wife and child to lusting for good whiskey in the time it took to sing a hymn. But Riley was no longer dead; his ghostly days were over, and as Hope passed the silver tray, as he took the grape juice in a shaking hand and passed the tray to Bree, Riley praised his maker for an answered prayer, because here at last was something truly good to drink.
AFTERWORD
WHEN THE CURE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED, some people wondered why Riley Keep would deliberately choose to drink the Communion wine in the end. Why would anyone voluntarily return to the living hell of alcoholism? And why would I present that as if it was a good thing?
For artistic reasons, it’s usually best to let a novel speak for itself. In this case however, with apologies to literary purists everywhere, I think maybe a few words of explanation are in order.
All around the world people say “nobody’s perfect” as if it were a law of nature or a self-evident fact. Some of us may seem less morally flawed than others, but we all know the difference is only a matter of degree. No matter how kind and caring and good we may appear to be, from time to time we all deliberately choose to do something that we know is wrong.
Most religions claim we can live moral lives if we so choose. But if that were true wouldn‘t somebody, somewhere, choose the right thing every time? “Nobody’s perfect” is true the same way “what goes up must come down” is true. Like gravity, and like the urge behind Riley Keep’s alcoholism, when it comes to morality there are forces at work beyond our control. Nobody chooses goodness all the time, because nobody can.
Much as a drug-addicted mother will give birth to a baby addicted to those same drugs, we are all born addicted to bad choices. Take two toddlers and put one desirable toy between them. Will you see a demonstration of selfless generosity? Will one of them offer the toy to the other? Not likely. Innocent though we’d like to think they are, the bigger, faster toddler will end up with the toy and the other one will throw a fit, as every parent knows.
When I wrote about Riley’s alcohol addiction, all of this was on my mind. The Cure is not just about one man’s struggle against alcoholism. It’s about every person’s struggle against the addiction to self-centered immorality that afflicts the human race.
Most religions focus on the symptoms of our addiction. The assumption is, if one can control the behavior, one has solved the problem. To be a good person, one has only to act like a good person. But every alcoholic knows that isn’t true. The addiction remains, whether one drinks or not.
We also try to solve this problem with science. From time to time the headlines announce cures for various addictions, but there is no such thing. There is only the replacement of one symptom with another. Nicotine patches instead of cigarettes. Methadone instead of heroin. We can “cure” gluttony with stomach stapling; we can “cure” a pornography compulsion with filters on computers, but no human invention could cure us of the reason those addictions exist in the first place.
For that, we don’t need religion, and we don’t need science. We need a miracle.
In Second Corinthians Saint Paul famously admits he has something he calls “a thorn in my flesh,” but while Paul is wise enough to ask God to remove it, Riley Keep turns to technology instead. And at first the technology seems to work because Riley no longer needs to drink. But is he really cured?
No, he remains vulnerable. One sip of alcohol can put him right back where he was. So while the external evidence of Riley’s addiction is controlled, the internal cause—the thing that made him drink in the first place—remains unchanged. This is literally true of alcoholics who have not had a drink for decades. It’s literally true of everyone.
In his celebrated Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says God doesn’t merely want us not to murder; He also cares about the anger in our hearts that causes murder. He says God doesn’t only care about adultery; He also cares about indulging in the hidden, selfish lust in our hearts that leads to adultery. Jesus says this so we can understand that he didn’t sacrifice himself on the cross to pay the penalty for our immoral choices; He came to save us from the broken thing inside that forces us to make immoral choices in the first place. He came to give us peace.
Because of his alleged cure, Riley isn’t drinking anymore, yet he’s not at peace. Riley carries an overwhelming sense of guilt in spite of his sobriety, as so many “dry drunk” alcoholics do. He often says he feels “weighed down”. And what does he do about that? He works hard to try to make up for all the bad choices in his life.
Countless good deeds have been done for the wrong reason. It’s good to do our best to make things right with those we’ve harmed, but Riley does it for his own sake, to get out from under the “weight.” So all his efforts to do good amount to nothing. Indeed, they’re worse than nothing; they actually cause more damage. His wife Hope is suspected of taking bribes, his daughter is pregnant out of wedlock, the town is dying, and all because “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me,” as Saint Paul said in the book of Romans. Then, finally, when willpower and religious rules and technology and good works have all failed, with the town in ashes, Hope in the hospital, Willa dead, and Riley in jail for murder, at last we come to this:
“He thought about the weight that never lifted no matter what he did. Sober, drunk, broke or flush, in love or alone, it did not matter. And suddenly he realized what it was he had forgotten in a clearing choked with carnage seven years ago, the reason for his incapacitating weakness. When I am weak, then I am strong.”
That last sentence is a Bible quote. It means Riley finally understands his problem. The miracle he needs won’t come while he’s pretending that he doesn’t need it. But how can he stop pretending, now that he is sober (on the outside) and the richest man in Maine?
For Riley, the answer lies in drinking the Communion wine, in voluntarily acknowledging the fact that his addiction still remains, in literally
becoming weak enough to genuinely accept God’s amazing grace.
In writing this ending, of course I’m not suggesting alcoholics ought to drink. Heaven forbid that anyone should take Riley’s choice literally. It’s a literary metaphor, expressing the fact that his drinking is caused by a spiritual problem, so he needs a spiritual solution.
This is old news to anyone already working the Alcoholics Anonymous program. After all, step one in the program is “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol,” and step two is “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Still, for some readers Riley’s choice may smack of taking God for granted, much like a drunk who continually gets into trouble because he has a friend or family member who enables that behavior by coming to the rescue. But this misses the point.
When Saint Paul tells us he was given a thorn in his flesh he doesn’t tell us what it is. He seems to omit that information intentionally, so we can all relate to his circumstances. Paul asks God three times to remove his thorn, but God explains that Paul is better off with it in place. The thorn—whatever it may be—is a constant reminder that Paul is powerless without God. It reminds him to stay humble, to admit his own willpower isn’t strong enough to overcome his affliction, and to focus instead on help from a Power greater than himself. So as much as it hurts, Paul accepts his thorn. In fact, he boasts about it. It is this very event that leads him to write those famous words: “When I am weak, then I am strong.”
I was thinking about Paul’s thorn when the idea for The Cure came to me. I asked myself, “If someone had offered an instant cure for Paul’s problem, would he have taken it in spite of what God said? And if he did, what would have happened next?” I decided such a “cure” would have made life even more miserable for Paul. I decided I would rather live with the humiliating weakness of my own addiction to immorality, than suffer from the lonely delusion that I had no need for God. And then I decided to write about a man who came to that same conclusion.
- Athol Dickson
Laguna Niguel, California
May 3, 2012
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ATHOL DICKSON IS A NOVELIST, TEACHER, and independent publisher. His novels transcend description with a literary style that blends magical realism, suspense, and a strong sense of spirituality. Critics have compared his work to such diverse authors as Octavia Butler (Publisher’s Weekly), Hermann Hesse (The New York Journal of Books) and Flannery O’Connor (The New York Times). One of his novels is an Audie Award winner and three have won Christy Awards. He is also the author of the bestselling memoir, The Gospel according to Moses. Athol lives with his wife in southern California.
To learn more about Athol and his novels,
please visit his website at
www.AtholDickson.com
and like his facebook fan page.
The Cure Page 31