by Adam Roberts
You’re a lawyer, yes?
I had a heart attack. That happened when I was in a steak restaurant with two friends, Mare Obenreizer and Solomon Chifadza. My divorce was behind me. Mare was a writer like me, and Sol worked in business. He was a business troubleshooter. We were all having a meal together, because we were old friends. Sol was talking, saying about some company or other he’d audited, how he’d gone in and come out a fortnight later. ‘I saved them four hundred thousand a year,’ he was saying. He repeated the sum as three sentences: ‘Four. Hundred. Thousand.’ Then he said, ‘I told them how to smarten up, slim down. I ran up 20,000 bones on my own.’ Then he was telling another story about how he planned to buy up a shipwreck, this grain ship wrecked on the coast of Mexico somewhere, snap it up, going for a song, who else would want to buy a wrecked ship? – spine broken, this ship – and all the grain swollen and spoilt, salt water in all the grain compartments. Snap it up for a song, since the cargo was ruined and the ship could not be made seaworthy. ‘But you know what I’ll do?’ He waggled his eyebrows. I leant a little towards him, holding my beer bottle so that its red-white label rested against my cheek, because it was a very warm night. ‘This is what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘Truck some pigs down there, Texas pigs, and have them fattened on that fucking grain. The boat went down in the estuary for Christ’s sake, I’ll guess it’s not even that salty, the water there. The water in an estuary is not necessarily all salt?’
‘The water,’ said Mare, with a drunk man’s seriousness, ‘in an estuary is not necessarily all that salty.’
‘I’ll be prince of pigs,’ said Sol. ‘Pigs eat whatever.’ He said whatever like a teenage girl, for laughs. ‘They’ll eat cigar ends, sawdust, you-say-what. Ship them back up for sausages and pork bellies, and I’ll make moo-chow die-near-ow.’ Mare laughed at this. He was drunk enough to laugh at anything. I smiled, but it was as much a grimace as anything, because there was a soreness in my ribs and up in my shoulder, over on my left side. It felt like an indigestive pain, a sort of hot, burning pain. Sometimes I get little catches of pain in my chest when I breathe in deeply, which I think (I’ve asked doctors) has to do with a slight tendency to inflammation of the pleural membranes, inflammation that the residue of my unhealthy lifestyle brings on me from time to time. That pain usually catches in my chest for a breath or two and then goes away. I figured I was experiencing that same thing.
I was wearing a lemon-colored hessian jacket, with a black Dandy Warhols T-shirt under it. I hadn’t changed the shirt in a couple of days.
Sol said mucho dinero again in his comedy accent.
Mare said Robert die-near-ow, and laughed; and Sol laughed.
I widened my grimace, because the pain was growing fast. Then my elbow slipped from the table and I slumped. The beer bottle fell from my hand. It tap-tapped on the table and it fell over, vomiting beer and suds from its tiny glass mouth. The pain had suddenly swollen, had become very fierce, like a broken bone. It didn’t recede, it was lodged in my torso like rock. It grew harder. I gasped as I slid to the floor. The last thing I remember was Sol’s face: the black freckles on his beef-colored skin looking like dark glitter, and his wide face stretched wider with this huge fucking grin as I dropped to the floor. This, let me assure you, is what death feels like. I know what dying feels like. Your blood runs to fire and acid in your chest and shoulders, and you can’t stop yourself falling to the floor, and everything is blanked out with the pain. I was down on the floor. I told myself, man you are down lying on the floor now. Up above I could still hear them laughing deeper, laughing louder, thinking I was only fooling around. A massively dense pressure was crushing my chest and my shoulder from front and back at once, squeezing and squeezing until beads of blood (I am sure) were wrung out of my very bones. It was agonizing.
That was my heart attack. I was conscious all the way in the ambulance, but the pain was so fierce I couldn’t speak, I could barely breathe. Sol rode with me. His flat wide face kept looming over me and he kept saying things like ‘you hang in there’ and ‘nearly there now’. Then we were at the hospital, and Mare had taken a taxi and arrived before us. He manifested his concern in a different manner to Sol, by joking with me, and jollying me, by calling me names like ‘a hell of a cuss’ and ‘you old boozer’ in an Irish accent, and ‘hurry up an’ get well, I wanna go back to the bar’. These two approaches, Sol’s concern and Mare’s joking, represented their diverse personalities.
Surgeons operated.
And the next day, when I was all alone, and the sunlight was so fierce through the window in my room that it made my eyes water, the doctor came by. ‘I am not the police,’ he told me. I said, OK. ‘If you keep taking cocaine,’ he said, ‘at the rate it was yesterday present in your blood then you can look to have half a dozen heart attacks like this a year until you eventually die. I wouldn’t give you even a year until that happens. Until,’ he repeated, in case I had misconstrued, ‘you die. Yes? It will bury you. Yes? You certainly won’t reach forty-five. Understand: I am not even talking about the alcohol and the cigarettes and who-knows-what-else. I am only talking about the cocaine and about the weaknesses of your constitution. Yes?’
I said yes. I was meek, and alarmed at what the doctor said.
After he left I sat in the bed and stared at the folds of white blanket over my feet. I thought of shrouds.
But in a little while my spirit revived. I prepared a speech for the doctor, rehearsing it mentally over and over. I planned to call the nurse and ask her to bring the doctor. Then when he came to see me I would tell him that he was wrong about cocaine. I didn’t need to cut it out entirely – reduce it a little maybe, but not total abstinence. I would tell him that in moderation it was merely a useful stimulant, not unlike coffee. I’d tell him that Sigmund Freud took cocaine, and credited it with much of his best work. Moreover, I’d say, doc, I’d say, you have to understand the environment in which I work. I work in the movies (this wasn’t true, but that’s what I was going to tell the doctor). Everybody in the movies takes cocaine (this, again, was only a half-truth, but what the hey). If I abstained people would think I was weird, I would lose work, friends and contacts would avoid me. So you see, doc, it is a necessity that I am able to indulge, just a little bit, from time to time. So what I want, doc, what I need, is for you to give me some medical leeway – come up with some medication, some treatment – some regime I can adopt – which will enable me still to get high, drink, smoke, screw, work for twenty-hour shifts, and do all the other things I need to do. I imagined the doctor replying but it is illegal in a timorous voice, and at that point I would add: maybe it is, although you and I – we are rational adults, and we can agree that it should not be illegal in a so-called free country. However, granted that, technically, it is illegal. Here is one of the beauties of our little conversation, doc. Because there is such a thing as doctor-patient confidence, isn’t there? If you prescribe me something to deal with the powder then there’s no need for the police ever to hear about it. Do you see?’
I never had this conversation with my doctor. Of course my doctor would have told the police. There’s no such thing as patient-doctor confidentiality.
It took me months to recuperate from the operation. My chest hurt much of the time, embers from the pain of the attack itself. To be precise, it hurt where they had separated the ribs to get at the throbbing organ, a luggage-seam of stitching and plasticated scar tissue red-pink against my yellower flesh. Eventually this hurt wore away, and I began to feel more like my old self. But there was an important change in the world. My insides had been on view to the world. That was what I kept thinking. I looked at a copy of the consent form I had signed, and I noticed that the hospital retained the right to film operations for training purposes. I couldn’t find out, nobody seemed to know, if this had happened with my operation. But I became convinced it had. I became convinced that the world had seen my red and glisteny insides. That’s not a comfortable thought, you know.
But, Christ, there were conversations here that I had assumed were private, were just between myself and my wife. Our sex life, for Christ’s sake? The things I said in anger? That’s hardly fair. The time I met her in the restaurant, and I was a little high, and the things we said before she told me she wanted a divorce – it was all there, only I was malodorous and twitchy, constantly looking over my shoulders, and my skin was spotty, and I was rubbing my nose with the back of my hand like a screen-cliché junkie. Our wedding night was there, when I got a little too drunk, and took some pills, and had to throw up in the hotel bathroom for a little while. That was there. Is, I wondered, nothing sacred? I spoke to a lawyer, to see if the book was actionable. She told me that unless I had specified with my wife prior to any conversation with her that the content of said conversation was to be regarded as confidential, then a court would be unlikely to uphold any charges on grounds of breach of confidentiality. I said, heated, pepped up on a little powder, who the fuck makes that sort of stipulation before talking to their spouse? The lawyer shrugged. She was wearing a blue suit, jacket and skirt, not unlike the outfit my wife was wearing in her author photograph.
After that meeting I walked the city for a while in a sort of fugue state, my vision narrowed with hopelessness and anger. I went into a bookshop and stood in front of a display of Living With an Adulterer. More in sorrow than rage I took one of the books from the display and started tearing it. The checkout boy came round to remonstrate with me. The manager came too. I was crying. Jesus, that was a low point. I ripped four copies, ripped the covers off. ‘It’s a betrayal,’ I kept saying. ‘I’m making a protest,’ I said. The bookstore was in a mall, and the mall had a security guy and he came by, told me to stop, sir, desist, sir, and eventually he grabbed me in a neck-lock from behind. ‘It’s a betrayal,’ I told him. ‘Sure it is,’ he told me. ‘You going to calm yourself?’ ‘I’m calm,’ I said. ‘I’m calm.’ I paid for the four books, and the checkout guy insisted on giving me the books themselves in a plastic bag to carry away with me, even though I didn’t want them, what would I do with four ripped-up books? So then I wandered the city for a while carrying those four ripped-up books in a plastic bag, not knowing where I was going, not knowing what to do. Still holding the bag I put my credit card into a public phone and called my ex-wife. I got her answer machine. I blabbed into that, for a long time. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Fuck it, Mary, I’m so sorry.’ It was pathetic. I thought about suicide. I didn’t think through the specifics, but only the general idea of it. Then I went into a bar and through to the rest room, and I sat in a cubicle and sniffed up a little pile of cocaine powder. It made my sore heart hurry in my chest, and made my blood pump with a scary vigor. I told myself, ‘This is it, this is the death, my system has been overloaded, I’m going to be found dead slumped on the john in some bar somewhere, just as the doctor said.’ But I didn’t die, obviously, and after a while, and after some more sniffing, I felt a little better. I washed in cold water, and walked out of the bar leaving the bag of torn books in the cubicle.
That was a low point.
The AWP gave me focus, helped me through that time. They were closer than my friends. My friends, not to put too fine a point on it, were fucking useless. Sol came to see me, and he creased his face in a serious mask, and said to me, ‘Look, I talked to a friend of mine, a detox guy. I told him about you.’
‘You told him about me?’ I said, wiping my nose with the palm of my hand. ‘Jesus, Sol.’
‘I’m worried, man,’ he said. ‘About you. He’s confidential, man, he’ll keep it to himself. And, like, it’s not that unusual in your business is it now? – a habit, a certain loss of control. You know?’
‘I thought you were discreet, man,’ I told him, severely. ‘I thought you’d respect my confidences.’
‘You had a heart attack, you could have died, I talked to my man, he says that detox is a stroll these days, a stroll, compared to what it used to be. It’s not cold turkey and sitting in a ring like AA. It’s much more modern-day. You want I should set up a session with him?’
‘With who?’
‘With my friend, man. Get you looked at. You had a heart attack, you could have died.’
‘I can’t believe you went to some stranger and spilled my whole story to him,’ I said, growing angry.
‘Not some stranger, a friend of mine.’
But the AWP didn’t care that I did drugs. That was not the issue for them. Indeed, I had several interesting conversations with my cadre leader on that subject. His name was Mo (for Maurice) Gaché; from Louisiana originally, now resident in New York. A large man, bearded over face and neck like black turf, a ponytail, a meaty nose, the flesh of his face gathered in broad bunches, but tiny little eyes like beads of blue blood squeezed out of that clenched face. During the first quarter of the Year of Our Salvation two-thousand-X I spent a lot of time buzzing between Gaché’s house on Third and my latest hotel, the romantically named Cielo di Pisa on Straight. Gunning the engine of my tiny Volvo and zipping through the traffic, parking skew, dashing along the street to Gaché’s steps, pushing his bell button as I panted. There was no actual hurry, except that I made myself hurry, I strained to inject urgency into my life to distract myself from the zeroness of it. ‘Hi Mo,’ I would say, as he opened the door, ‘I can’t stay, I got the group in forty minutes.’ The group was a substance-abuse seminar I had agreed to attend three times a week. I had hit another car in a parking lot just as the owner was returning to it. The owner and I had got into an argument over the damage. The police had been called, and I had been arrested. My blood, according to whichever lab the police subcontracted this work to, contained traces of cocaine and amphetamine. I was charged,
fined, and ordered to attend the substance abuse meeting thrice a week. The judge had used that exact word: thrice. My attorney had queried it in court: ‘Twice a week sir?’ Three times, the judge had said, irritably. Three times.
‘That fucking group,’ Mo said as he let me in.
Mo did not approve of the state poking its nose into what he considered my private business. For him it was symptomatic of everything that was wrong.
I had to wait in the hall whilst he bolted the door. I could not simply stand there quietly. I had to shift the weight inside my body from my left foot to my right – not hopping from foot to foot precisely, but swaying over and then back in staccato little shifts of center-of-gravity; and wiping my nose on the back of my hand, and looking into all the corners and crevices of Mo’s hallway, and then thinking that it was kind of gross to wipe my nose on my hand like this, and pulling out one of the silk handkerchiefs I had bought for my constantly streaming nose and blowing phlegm into the fabric. ‘I got to use your john before we start,’ I told him. ‘I’m busting.’
‘Sure,’ he said.
He knew, of course, but he really didn’t care.
Afterwards we sat in Mo’s front room. There was a large poster of Trotsky, with a several-lines-long slogan printed over his face, something about sitting in his room and thinking the world was a beautiful place. There were thousands of books on the walls. Mo owned thousands of books. The walls were fish-scaled with their spines. He had net curtains over his windows.
We talked shop – which is to say, terrorism. Do you perk up as I say this? I can picture your reaction precisely. September 11. March 11. But it’s ancient history. I don’t even know if Mo survived the Snow. I haven’t seen him in five years. So we talked about the plans we were making, as a group, for an assault. Three bombs on one day, a Sunday to minimize casualties. A New York newspaper office; a coffee shop; and a blimp exploding over the White House – we were going to hire a blimp in Washington, pack it with explosive, float it over the White House and explode it. The plan wasn’t to injure the President, or anybody. It was to make a splash. We were going to paint the words ‘True Freedom’ on the side of the blimp. When it exploded it would make all the TV networks: images of True Freedom going down in flames over the White House. It would be irresistible visual copy. It would run all over the world. We were doing something, at least. We had a statement ready, that I had helped draft. I can’t remember all the words of it, not precisely, but it was about freedom. Americans boast that they will live free or die, but they have handed their freedom over to the press, to a tyrannical government, to corporations – to a capitalist world that thinks the freedom to choose latte or espresso is a suitable replacement for the freedom to live, speak and do as you wish. Lots more in that idiom. You get the point. This attack was months in the preparation, but it was never executed.