The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  As long as I had enough pills to get me through each day, I thought, this would be fine. Every day, I was ingesting a little bit more—another Adderall here, another morphine there, one more Xanax, an extra Ambien—and smoking pot most nights, but I tried to stay away from alcohol, which seemed to be a nasty potentiator.

  I was nearly through October. If I could just get to December, I thought, I would be fine. Then I could figure out my next moves.

  Each day felt like a victory in miniature. I took less Adderall so I could sell it, and spent the cash on painkillers.

  I used my fake ID to buy alcohol for others, charging a modest fee.

  I scraped by.

  The biggest party of the year so far was a dance on Halloween. Annalise was a “slutty nun”; I was a prep school dropout, an unlit cigarette clenched between my teeth, a blue blazer, and shredded khakis. (“You’re so fucking lazy,” Annalise said. “Talk about typecasting.”) We had picked up a few hits of Ecstasy for the occasion, and also some blow, and several bottles of vodka, which were stored in my room for safekeeping until the big event.

  I started the day with some Adderall to get myself out of bed, then a few lines of Dilaudid.

  Then a hit of morphine for good measure.

  More Adderall.

  I packed a bowl and smoked it. The pregame was in my room; people started to come over. My nerves were acting up.

  I took a Xanax.

  Annalise gave me two Klonopin.

  I took an Ambien to get that surreal, floating feeling I liked so much.

  Things got fuzzier, but I still didn’t feel good—just sort of fatigued. I could have taken a standardized test.

  We started doing blow.

  We cut it with Ritalin to make it last longer.

  We smoked again.

  Annalise and I took the E. I waited for the roll to kick in. But it didn’t. It was almost time to head out and I was still basically sober.

  I cataloged everything I had ingested—how was this possible? I wanted euphoria. Barring that, obliteration.

  So I started pouring shots of vodka, chased with a fruity alcoholic drink. My stomach was empty—it had been so long since I’d eaten a square meal. It went to my head.

  I blacked out.

  The beeping of a heart monitor. The pinch of an IV in my arm. I was in a hospital bed, paper sheets prickling my skin.

  Oh no, I thought. Not this again.

  A doctor murmuring. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, so I just nodded.

  Then, a taxi, winding through the back roads of the Hudson Valley. I shook my head, my vision flickering.

  Then, back at my dorm, standing in front of the vending machine, I was so desperately hungry. The emptiness inside me had never been quite so enormous. A self-disgust that made me feel like my throat was closing. There was a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket; I slid it into the machine and started pressing buttons. Potato chips. Chocolate chip cookies. Sour gummy candy. Chocolate bars. Strawberry milk. I carried it in my arms up to my dorm, but the door was locked. I slid down in the hallway outside my room and started opening the snacks, tearing into them, rapacious, sucking synthetic cheddar dust from my fingers. I ate until my stomach was engorged and my mouth was sticky with mucus. I looked down at the contours of my body with complete loathing.

  If I’d had a knife, I would have sliced myself open and emptied the contents of my gut out onto the floor.

  You monster. You disgusting pig.

  I could feel it starting to rise in my throat. Leaving the hallway littered with trash, I sprinted to the bathroom. Shoving two fingers into my mouth, I retched and hurled, shaking and gripping the edges of the toilet.

  Stripping off my clothes, I walked into the shower. I lathered up with soap, washing the scum and shame away. I picked up a glass bottle of expensive facial cleanser, but my grip was so feeble, it slipped through my hands and shattered on the floor, sending wet soapy shards flying everywhere, slicing my feet. I yelped and dropped to the ground reflexively, cutting my legs and thighs. I didn’t care.

  Hot water poured down on my head as rivulets of bloody, soapy water swirled down the drain, staining the white tile pink. The anguish that had been building for two months bubbled up in my throat.

  Something inside me ruptured. I began to sob—a deep, heavy, hacking cry. I shuddered and wept on the floor. God, I thought, where are you now? I thought about that moment alone in the wilderness with the fire, just me and the darkness and a little bit of light. I had felt so close to something—even just for a moment.

  But that feeling was gone. There was no fire left. Dully, I considered the likelihood that the next overdose would be the one to take me out.

  Annalise came over later that day. I was in bed, despondent. My head was pounding and my legs were covered in bandages.

  “You’re a mess,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “I know.”

  “Do you remember anything about what happened last night?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Do you want to know?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, first you threw up on some girl in the elevator,” she said. “Then, at the dance, you were obviously super fucked up, so the security guard was trying to get you out—but you didn’t want to leave, so you were, like, fighting her. And then you ran out. And she started chasing you. And this huge crowd started gathering, watching, and it was getting way unruly. So they pulled the fire alarm to evacuate the entire building and carried you out on a stretcher while everyone watched.”

  I stared blankly at her. “No, I didn’t,” I said. How could I have? I had no memory of any of it.

  “You really did,” she said.

  “So everyone saw?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was almost too much to take in. So far, my self-destruction had been mostly private; the idea that this showdown had been so public was more than I could stand.

  “I have to leave school,” I said. “I can’t show my face here.”

  “It’ll blow over,” Annalise said, but even she sounded unsure.

  “No,” I said. “It won’t.” I paused. “I’m such a fucking disaster.”

  “I know, darling,” she said. “But you’re such a lovable disaster.”

  “There aren’t that many people left who would agree with you.”

  She stroked my head. “It’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  I began to cry. “I don’t think this is going to work. Staying here, I mean.”

  Annalise looked frustrated. “You can’t leave. What am I going to do without you? Everyone here is so”—she searched for the right word—“boring.” She bit her lip. “Maybe you just need a little getaway. Canyon Ranch.”

  I shook my head. “I need to go back to rehab. Everything is so fucked up.”

  She considered this. “Well, that could work, too, I guess.”

  “I really need it to stick,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  She brightened. “I’ll help you pick a really chic rehab.”

  I called my mother to tell her that I had decided to go back to treatment. She sounded relieved. But when I called my father, he was angry. “You can’t finish out the semester?” he said, exasperated.

  “I really can’t, Dad,” I cried. “I would if I could. But I really don’t think I can. Things have just gotten really bad here.” The walls of my dorm room were closing in around me. “I’m really sick.”

  “I’m so disappointed,” he said. I wasn’t even self-aware enough to realize that he had been right not to pay for college—that I was just as much of a liability as he’d expected.

  Later, he sent me an email. Attached was a spreadsheet outlining my projected expenses for my stay in treatment, then an approximate budget for living independently after I left. He had checked with my student insurance to find my deductible for mental health treatment.

  “I suggest that you pay the first $10,000 for your stay yourself,” read the message, “
then work with insurance companies to pay the rest.” I stared at the screen, then pulled out a tab of Dilaudid to snort. It was my last one.

  The message was clear: he was finished with cleaning up after me, finished trying to manage this expensive waste I had become.

  I was broke—I didn’t have enough for a pack of cigarettes. I’d taken out loans to pay for the failed experiment that my higher education was turning out to be. I couldn’t take on more, but I couldn’t stay where I was. I felt so trapped.

  “He doesn’t get it,” my mother said when I called her. “You’re sick. Would he be telling you to pay for it yourself if you had cancer? Or even if you were schizophrenic? Or had attempted suicide? He thinks it’s a moral failure. It’s not. It’s a mental health issue.” But it felt like a moral failure.

  I could readily acknowledge that something strange happened to my body when I put drugs and alcohol in it—I couldn’t help myself, I needed to be in an altered state all the time—but I was also certain that I was a fundamentally terrible person. Full of revulsion for who I had become, and yet helpless to behave any differently.

  My mother called me back the next day. “I’ll help you,” she said grimly. “Just go get sober.”

  I told the administration that I was having a mental health crisis and had to leave school early. They didn’t put up much of a fight—nor should they have.

  Annalise and I found a program in Arizona. “Oh, Naomi Campbell went here!” Annalise exclaimed. “And they have an on-site acupuncturist!”

  I booked a flight.

  I spent my last days at Vassar smoking weed in my dorm room and crying for hours at a time. I was going through opiate withdrawal, but I couldn’t afford the pills anymore, so instead I got so stoned that I couldn’t feel anything.

  I rationed out my Xanax and Adderall carefully so I wouldn’t run out before leaving.

  Annalise knew the glamorous part was over—that it was silly to keep reaffirming how fabulous we were—but she kept it going just the same. When she came over, it was as if I were leaving on a luxurious holiday. She helped me pack up my things, deciding what I should take with me and what to put in storage.

  “Do I need a green Dior trench coat in rehab?” I said.

  “I mean, what’s your rehab look?”

  I thought about it. “Urban safari,” I said.

  She nodded briskly. “Pack it.”

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I came here to make a big impression, and now all I want is to be forgotten.”

  “You’re unforgettable,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks.

  But preparing to leave was painful. I didn’t say good-bye to most of my friends. I just wanted to slip quietly away into the night.

  My father picked me up at Vassar the night before my flight. His face was stony as I carried boxes downstairs. Perhaps he was afraid for me, or maybe he was just incredulous that I’d managed to do this again. But I couldn’t see what he saw, the pattern of embarrassing mistakes and unfulfilled commitments that was starting to become so predictable. I only saw the sharp-edged specifics of each little catastrophe, clinging to this insistent belief that it could have been different if only the world had been kinder to me. I would have told anyone who would listen that the blame lay with the university that should have kept a closer eye on me, the parents who should have loved me more fiercely, the friends who were such a bad influence, the rehabs that failed to fix me. Just so long as I didn’t have to admit that it was all my fault.

  We drove back to the city in silence.

  The following day, my father and I went to the storage unit in East Harlem where my things from high school were being kept, and I dropped off my things from college.

  I hadn’t expected to be doing that so soon.

  Alone in the storage locker, I pulled open a cardboard box with my name on it. My high school yearbook was inside. Letters from Dean. Homework assignments I had saved for some reason—I couldn’t say why. All these relics of a person I had been. I wasn’t him anymore, but I wasn’t myself, either. I felt like a ghost.

  A few hours before I left for the airport, Annalise texted me. “Did you leave yet? I’m in the city.”

  “Come over,” I said.

  She met me downstairs in front of Jennifer’s building.

  “People are already asking where you went,” Annalise said. “There’s a rumor that you got kicked out.”

  I smiled. “That makes me sound a lot edgier than I actually am,” I said.

  “Want me to keep it going?”

  “Definitely.”

  I hesitated. I’d been self-conscious of anyone seeing Jennifer’s apartment after I had projected this image of Upper East Side glamour; the rather humble reality of crashing on a couch in my father’s girlfriend’s Yorkville one-bedroom wasn’t something I was eager to share. But it also felt wrong, somehow, to keep maintaining that illusion with the truest friend I had.

  “Do you want to come up?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Upstairs, I saw it afresh through her eyes: the worn floorboards, the oversize birdcage, the kitchen in need of updating. But she didn’t say anything, and I was grateful to her for that—for seeing who I truly was, not who I had pretended to be to delight her. She had always seen through it, anyway.

  I gave her my little glass pipe. “I guess I don’t need this anymore,” I said. “Take good care of it.”

  “I’m going to drop this and break it in five minutes,” she said.

  I walked her out and we embraced on the street.

  “Don’t stay too long,” she said. “I can’t do this without you.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Ten

  I sent postcards from rehab.

  The emblazoned logo of the facility. Glossy card stock splashed with images of terra-cotta stonework, the leafy eyelashes of palm trees, the impossible cerulean rippling of the swimming pool.

  This, I thought, is how getting sober should be.

  The first Sunday I was there, there was a grief group. No one I’d known had ever died, I realized, but I had almost died—twice. Did that count?

  Kathleen, a model from Los Angeles, talked about the abortion that she’d had when she was seventeen, how she had grieved the loss of the baby she never knew. Bernard shared about losing his father to cancer.

  I said: “I’m grieving the loss of the person I thought I was supposed to be.”

  I began to talk about Princeton, about my dreams, about how it had all fallen apart. Midsentence, I looked over at Kathleen, who had an expression on her face that looked like contempt.

  Later, smoking a cigarette outside, I approached her. “Did I say something to offend you?” I asked.

  “You just think you had it so fucking rough,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose anything.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  “Everyone here thinks you’re fucking ridiculous,” she said. “We talked about it in group today. It’s not about where you went to school or who you partied with. Nobody here gives a shit. Some of us are trying to get sober so we can survive.”

  “I am, too,” I said. How dare she? She didn’t know me. She didn’t know my pain.

  Kathleen extinguished her cigarette.

  “Well,” she said, “start acting like it.”

  The Arizona desert was still by night, a quiet so deafening that it assumed a sort of magnitude, a weight in the air. I left my room at five o’clock in the morning, moving swiftly through the darkened space, trying not to fumble, not flicking on the institutional lights of the bathroom as I changed into swim trunks and a T-shirt. My roommates’ still-sleeping forms in their beds. The door clicked quietly behind me and I stood there for a moment, looking out at the dark emptiness of the night.

  I walked quickly down the footpath that led around the perimeter of the property, silent save the slapping of my flip-flops against the ground. It was so cold, neck-prick
le cold, the brisk slap of the wind lifting the hairs on my calves. I curved up past the nurse’s station and clicked open the gate enclosing the swimming pool, trying to make out the shapes in the dark, when I saw someone seated by the edge of the water. I squinted. A tawny head, sturdy frame.

  “Jane,” I said.

  Jane raised a hand in greeting, kicking her feet, making ripples that interrupted the glassy surface of the water.

  “Hi, Sam,” she said.

  I liked Jane, although I hadn’t gotten to know her well in the two weeks I’d been back in treatment. She was a registered nurse who had become addicted to opiates after struggling with alcoholism her whole life; in her midforties, with close-cropped blond-gray hair and a sympathetic, maternal air. We didn’t have our main process group together, but I saw her in twelve-step meetings and specialized groups. I always felt like if I’d gotten separated from my mother in a grocery store as a small child and I’d seen Jane, I would have asked her for help.

  She was comforting, trustworthy.

  “I haven’t seen you here this early before,” she said.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I said, taking a seat on the bench across from her.

  She smiled. “I have a hard time sleeping, too. It’s too quiet here.” She stretched her arms up, feline. “So I wait until it’s almost sunrise, and then I come out here to do my morning meditation. Starts my day off right. The gate’s supposed to be locked, but it never is.”

  Jane pointed up to the sky, where tendrils of purple and orange were starting to snake out from the horizon.

  “Good timing,” she said. I nodded.

  “You’ve been here longer than I have, right?” I said. “When are you being discharged?”

  She shrugged. “Probably next week.”

  “Are you going home or to aftercare?”

  She twisted her hands so her palms were facing up. Who knows. “I’ll do whatever they tell me to do,” she said. “I’m not in a rush.”