But even as I write, I sense that I am just speculating.
I used to joke with my sister and her first husband about an imaginary journal, The Intuitive Scientist, edited by speculative non-scientists like us.
That was fun. That was a long time ago. Our minds were still spinning patterns from random thoughts.
—
Professor Heilig has done a TED Talk and blogs about compassion for addicts. The insular cortex, the region of the brain associated with emotions, shows more activity in the brains of addicted people exposed to painful images than in the brains of nonaddicted people, he says. He deduces that addicts feel pain, their own and others’, more acutely than other people, and that they probably self-medicate to dull the pain. Even if we don’t find new medicines, he hopes to be able to change judgemental and excluding attitudes and policies.
I’m moved by Heilig’s humane approach, but what does it mean in practice? Maintenance programs, I suppose—most commonly methadone or other man-made substitutes. There are many studies and metastudies showing that regular methadone stabilises mood and reduces HIV infection and criminal behaviour. That has to be good, and preferable to the dangerous cycle of short stints in prison or treatment followed by relapses and potential overdoses due to the loss of physical habituation.
—
Professor Heilig wants us all to hug an addict. I, too, believe in the power of love, but stock protestations of love may be meaningless to addicts, and equally meaningless to family members. Proclamations of love can feel artificial, especially if there is underlying anger. Small falsehoods, when perceived—and we are all masters of perception, while retaining the false belief that our own flattery or praise is less transparent—can lead to anxiety, alienation, or tolerant contempt, and anxious family members can confuse expressing love with a suspension of judgement, leading to collusion and enabling. Isn’t it better for addicts to be heard and understood than to be “loved”?
Winston, the hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, endures episode after episode of terrible pain while O’Brien, his torturer, reads his mind, accurately predicting his internal responses to mind-control techniques. They both understand that the aim is not to gain information—there is no information to be gained—but to break Winston’s mind. And like Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkeys frantically clinging to their punitive cloth mothers, Winston, now drugged, clings to his internal vision of O’Brien’s wise and ugly face. The man, despite everything, is someone he can talk to. “Perhaps,” he thinks, trying to understand this surge of affection, “one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
What chilling ambiguity Orwell draped around that innocuous phrase. The fact that it’s true—one probably would prefer being understood, a meeting of minds, to being loved—doesn’t alter the fact that at this stage all of Winston’s thoughts, including this meditation on love, are a predictable result of the torture.
There are no easy answers. There is as fine a line between medicine and poison as there is between therapy and interrogation. Every good model—tough love, limitless love—has a shadow, and every good quality or principle can become distorted and oppressive.
But perhaps a definition of hell is a lack of trust—it makes for a cold world, even if you are not an addict. Maybe that’s what faith and love (known cures for addiction) are all about—a leap into the dark. A decision to trust.
Addiction comes in many forms and degrees. At worst, you are locked into a loop: most drugs, opiates in particular, create a hunger which can be relieved only by more drugs. People turn secretive; their cores fracture. When the illness is severe, the addict, trusting no one, is trapped.
Unlike most drugs, opiates are physically addicting. But even heroin cravings are partly emotional. What other force could create such intense longing? Adding emotions to neurology is like adding gravity to physics—it’s an elusive and mysterious force, but without it the theories don’t make sense. But since blame and mistrust are such intrinsic components of addiction, there is danger in identifying causes; danger in creating narratives of unhappiness which might explain the emotional part of the addiction but could also feed it. That’s why 12-step programs steer away from causation.
Addiction is an emotional disease, and while methadone seems to reduce harm by tempering craving, that indescribably intense and hungry longing for a substance that transports you from one emotional state to another, it’s not a cure—it’s a policy solution of instant harm reduction, both to the addict and to families and society. Methadone is the weapon of realpolitik, not idealism.
—
You can argue the causes of addiction and the efficacy of treatment models every which way. I believe that addiction is a spectrum condition—and that we are all on the spectrum. The neurological model, based on the binary distinction between neurotypical and addictive brains, one or the other, doesn’t seem to me to recognise that. The genetic model of course is less binary, since the view now is that so many genes are involved, one way or another. Each one plays a part. And I imagine it’s likely that some mutations give protection against addiction, rather than the other way around.
There is the factor of time, too: what we are and what we become, in essence, can change.
*
Eric and I went to Tate Britain to see the Frank Auerbach show a year or so ago. Afterwards we happened to wander into an exhibition, just one room, on Art and Alcohol. I stood in front of a large painting titled The Last Day in the Old Home by Robert Braithwaite Martineau (1862). Eric was tired and sat down; he leant his heavy head on his hands and closed his eyes. I knew I should go to him, but I couldn’t leave this painting, this vibrant tableau of a stately home, soon to be sold, a dissolute father holding up a glass of champagne to the light, his son, no more than ten or so, standing by him, with his own glass of champagne. The unhappy mother reaches out towards her son, a useless timid gesture.
The father’s expression reminded me of the husband-villain Arthur Huntingdon in Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Huntingdon, too, drank and tried to draw his young son into drinking; he had an affair; he was absent and cruel; he was morally bankrupt.
The painting glistens; the sumptuous dark hall and everything in it must be sold. The man is a gambler, the summary states. Hardham Court is to be sold, “…thanks to the irresponsible behaviour of a feckless spendthrift.” The text details the visual clues, strangely only mentioning the champagne as a sign that father and son prefer “to live for the moment.” How reluctant we are to be moralistic about alcohol, even when a father gives his young son a glass of champagne, in an exhibition dedicated to the theme of art and alcohol.
The epic painting The Worship of Bacchus by George Cruikshank, completed in 1862, is there, too, a vast canvas at the centre of which is a man, drunk, dancing on a stone pedestal which is engraved with an epitaph: SACRIFICED AT THE SHRINE OF BACCHUS, FATHER, MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER, WIFE, CHILDREN, PROPERTY, FRIENDS, BODY AND MIND. In the background stand the eminent punitive institutions of the day—the asylum, the workhouse, the house of correction, and more—and in the foreground are scenes of drinking, of violence, of degradation.
—
Every generation reinvents its narratives and its drugs. Remember Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s heiress friend, who died aged twenty-eight of an overdose? How they crashed and burnt, those Sedgwick children. Edie was anorexic and spent time in numerous mental hospitals. One brother committed suicide; another died in a motorcycle crash that Edie believed may have been suicide, too.
Edie met Warhol in 1965. He took to her immediately and made a film in which she starred: Poor Little Rich Girl. She eventually broke with him and moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where she hung out with Bob Dylan and others, took drugs, and was hospitalised again and again, in between getting “vitamin shots” laced with speed and acid from a celebrity doctor.
Edie eventually married a fellow patient, Michael Post. She stopped using for a bit, then r
elapsed. In the end she died of a barbiturate overdose, in bed, next to her sleeping husband. “I gave her the ‘meds,’ and she started falling to sleep really fast,” he says in Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s book, Edie: An American Biography:
Her breathing was bad—it sounded like there was a big hole in her lungs…this sort of flopping, rough noise. She was such a cigarette fiend. It was a fixation with Edie to feel the heaviness of smoke in her lungs. She wanted to stop when she was thirty. That night it sounded so bad that I thought of waking her up and telling her that if she didn’t stop tomorrow I was going to give her a spanking or something.
The next morning he touched her shoulder and she was cold.
Andy Warhol’s other superstar, the wealthy and troubled Brigid Berlin, taped the conversation in which she told him about Edie’s death. Writer and film critic Bruce Williamson heard the tape. When, Andy asked, and how could she do a thing like that, and would he—Michael Post—inherit all the money?
Brigid told him there was no money. Well, what have you been doing, Andy said then.
And Brigid started talking about her dentist.
—
They fetishised that slightly camp indifference, of course, Andy Warhol and his followers.
If you don’t feel pain, is it still there; a ghost pain? If you cause others pain and feel no remorse, do you then have ghost guilt, an unconscious shadow staining your mind?
I contemplate this, talking to my psychoanalyst on the telephone. I sit in our guest bedroom; I have locked the door. This is a relief. I sometimes sit in the sky-blue armchair by the window; sometimes I stand up and lie down on the bed, cautiously, so that he won’t hear me move.
He knows my caution and says, many times, that this is my time. I can do what I like. I don’t have to turn up at his office, lie on his couch, stare at the dots on the ceiling, line up the dots to draw dismal squares and shapes in my mind.
“People do all kinds of things,” he says. “Sometimes they make telephone calls they can’t make on their own. Sometimes they read letters out loud.”
I am sitting on my chair, talking, when I hear a muted exclamation on the line. “It’s all right, it’s all right” I hear my psychoanalyst say gently to someone else. My mind flashes to the story of a friend doing family therapy with his wife and small children at the Tavistock Institute in London, and the shocking discovery that there were fifteen students sitting behind a one-way mirror observing the family interaction “for training purposes.” The session, my friend found out, had been secretly taped on video, too.
My analyst laughs a little. “It’s my dog,” he says. “She’s dreaming.”
“It’s all right, darling, go back to sleep,” he continues, with such gentleness, and I don’t know why but I think of Leo, my old dog, now dead—“put to sleep,” as the expression goes. He would doze on my lap in Sussex after the children left for school in the mornings. I would make another cup of coffee and lie on the sofa in the kitchen reading, with Leo sleeping on me. When he got too old to jump up, he would stand with his two front paws on the sofa, locking his eyes with mine, and I would lift him up. When he got too old to do even that, he would walk stiffly back and forth. I’d be reading, my right hand dangling to the floor, my cup on the back of the sofa leaning against the wall. Leo would walk himself between my hand and the sofa, so that my hand, resting, would stroke him automatically.
He walked up; he turned; he walked down; he turned, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes his head buffed my hand. Buffy Sainte-Marie, we called him, between ourselves, teasing him behind his back. Buffy Buffy. I would sit on the back steps and hug him; wave goodbye to the children with his paw.
7
During the twelve years of Hans and Eva’s relapse I had a recurring fantasy of kidnapping my brother and taking him to some remote place, slowly detoxing him there, bringing him back to life. I thought about who could help me; I thought about doctors; I thought about locks. I felt guilt about the fantasy, but at the same time I was also guiltily aware that it was my brother I fantasised about kidnapping, not Eva. Guilt for not doing enough and guilt for doing too much, guilt for fantasies of kidnap, guilt for the lack of fantasies of kidnap.
I doubt in any case that it would have worked. Addicts need to detox, but they need to reshape and rebuild the architecture of their psyches, too. It turns out I am not alone in this fantasy, though: other people have told me that they too have fantasised about kidnapping their addict. Addiction can seem like membership in a cult or a form of possession: the people you love are in there somewhere, bewitched like C. S. Lewis’s Prince Rilian, who was kept in an underground cave he thought of as the whole world. If you starve the demon of drugs, the former person might emerge.
But perhaps in fact it is the family members who are possessed. Their own accounts of addiction tend to be existentially painful, while addicts’ accounts are often curiously casual. Family members are on constant red alert; they are obsessed by the addiction; they go to such lengths to rescue, to save, to help. There is an addiction model for this—codependence. The addiction to the addiction. The absorption into other people’s lives and fates, at the expense of one’s own.
—
After Hans’s stay at Osea Island, the social workers got involved. I liked them, but by spring of 2007 it was clear that there was little they could do, and that Hans and Eva were getting worse. The social workers became increasingly concerned, until the fateful day in April 2007 when they told Lisbet and me that unless we took measures to remove the children, they would do so themselves. And that if they did take such a measure, it was most likely that the four children would be split up.
—
The court case.
I am reluctant to go back to those awful days.
The thought of our judge comforts me. Judge Barron was a woman in her sixties, occasionally impatient, obviously intelligent, and slightly intimidating. “Yes, yes, I understand that,” she would say impatiently, “but what I am trying to get at is…” Yes, yes, I understand that became another thing Eric and I would say to each other, a code, a reference, a shared history.
—
Fragments of memory. Lisbet on the cold floor of the restroom in the family court, sobbing. She is weeping so much she can’t breathe; I hold her.
The theatre of giving evidence. Lawyers try to trap you by shifting the discourse. How hard it is, always, to remain focused on the real issue, not to be drawn into the shifting discourses. We had to prove that we had nothing against Hans and Eva. We had to prove that we were not taking the children for our own gain.
In a case like this, everyone is under scrutiny, as of course they must be.
There were many interim hearings between the first one in May 2007 and the last, a two-and-a-half-week trial in February 2008. Hans and Eva arrived in court hours late every morning or even in the afternoon. Hans would be slumped forward, eyes half closed. Eva would fidget, increasingly restless, looking up at the clock on the wall, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Then she’d abruptly leave. Some time later she’d be back, swaying, slowly making her way to her seat, dreamily looking around her. Judge Barron observed, weary and astute. I think she knew that this would not end well. But we didn’t. We didn’t understand that every addiction case is the same dismal story.
Everyone in the room had seen it all before, except us.
—
Those years of failed hope. By the autumn of 2007 we had realised that Hans and Eva were not going to rehab, as we’d hoped they would, following the first hearing, when the children were temporarily placed with us. We had imagined that they would stay with us over the summer, and that by autumn they’d be back with their parents.
I wrote in one of my letters to Hans and Eva about seeing Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild, a young man’s journey into the wilderness of Alaska based on Jon Krakauer’s book about Christopher McCandless. In the end McCandless can’t get out: the river has risen. Trapped, and fatally poisoned
by mistaking one plant for another, he dies, emaciated, on an abandoned old bus, his temporary home in the wild. He had left his family, his rather ordinarily oppressive family, or perhaps slightly more so: it seems he couldn’t bear them anymore. Or perhaps he just wanted to be free, and join that lonely cult of freedom, the American wild.
I think of my brother’s wild trip, when he was younger than McCandless: the trans-Siberian railway, through China, through India, to Goa, to heroin. Heroin was the end, the final destination. But heroin was also an accident. He and his friends might never have met those girls on the beach in Goa.
What would have happened then?
I don’t know.
Some families are overprotective. Others, like ours, take a secret pride in the wild.
The glory of late-night horror films, running through the night, the wind, the salty wind.
—
I wrote to Hans and Eva that I imagined that they, too, had gone into the wild. McCandless left his family for nature, for Tolstoy and Thoreau. Hans and Eva left for drugs.
“I can’t follow you there,” I wrote.
No one could. Perhaps that was the point.
*
The children were with us from May 2007.
They were all so young. The youngest, aged six, sat on my shoulders on a walk. He held on to my head, then pinched my shoulder, quite hard. “Ouch,” I said. “That hurt.”
“I do want to hurt you a little bit,” he said. I squeezed his feet. His life at home was over.
Not that we knew that then.
—
And then suddenly they were all teenagers, talking by text, in code. I arranged to meet Daniel by the cathedral near his school:
“K c u btw r u driving me back with S”
“Yes. Teo is meeting me off the train and we all go back together. Xx”
“K tht will be gd see you soon xx”
—
That’s how it goes.
Mayhem Page 7