I met a couple I had never met before: Clark was a new student, a poet, and he and his wife, Tanya, were from Kansas. They were both good-looking and good-humored. Solid and stable people. I envied them immediately—their ease, their unblemished lives.
Anne was there. She hugged me when I walked in, and then we orbited each other for the rest of the night, never seeming to end up in the same conversation cluster at the same time. She had gained weight since I’d seen her last. Her shoulders puckered over the spaghetti straps on her tank top. The weight looked good on her. She was from a small town outside of Green Bay and was genetically positioned to carry weight well.
I downed Tecates and powered through a pack of cigarettes. The hostess had a cello, and she uncased it and sawed some Bach out of it.
The night ended with the Kiwi noisily making out with one of the poets in a dark corner while I drank and smoked. I was a scarecrow who barely resembled a human, stuffing myself whole with alcohol and nicotine. Tanya and Clark both came up and shook my hand before leaving.
Sally was whining when I got home (how’d I get home? Did someone drive me, or was I dumb enough to drive myself? If someone else drove me, how was I going to get cigarettes the next day?). I let her out and stared up at the stars as she pissed. I leaned inside and grabbed a beer out of the fridge, downing it while Sally cracked pecan shells between her teeth.
I woke up on the floor of a convenience store to a trio of faces staring down at me. My back was wet. There was cold air pouring down on me from a freezer door that was held open with my head. Cans of Diet Dr Pepper lay scattered around me.
One of the faces, a black one with tiny moles on the cheeks, laughed as I opened my eyes. “You will never be a boxer, son,” said the man. “I’ve never seen anyone go down that fast.”
One of the other faces, a white female one with pimples coming up under a heavy layer of base, called me honey and asked me if I was okay enough now to stand up.
I got up slowly, my legs shaky. I was in a uniform: striped shirt tucked into brown polyester pants. I had a name tag on but couldn’t read it.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone go down that hard,” the black man continued, the glee in his voice too evident. “That door hit you, and you hit the floor.”
The woman with the makeup pulled me aside. “I don’t think you have a concussion or anything. Go wait in the office and collect yourself.” She turned her wrist over to check a thin silver watch. “I can’t send you home. Just take your lunch break now, grab a fresh shirt from the pile, and take it easy. Okay, sweetie?”
I gestured to the mess behind me: cans of Diet Dr Pepper were smashed open and fizzing out onto the linoleum, a whole display shelf of Pringles was crashed down on the ground, the red tubes scattered down the aisle. “Did I do that?”
“You can take care of it when you come back. I’ll get Reggie to finish the stocking.” She leaned toward me and kissed me on the cheek. “Remember, I’m going to need you to pick up the kids from soccer after you’re done here. I’ve got court.”
Puzzled, I nodded and went into the room the woman gestured to. It was a tiny closet, just big enough for a desk and a chair. The desk was stacked with four monitors, which showed in scratchy black and white the goings-on of the store, the gas pumps, and the living room of my parents’ house in Ohio. I couldn’t find the light switch. I sat in the dark in front of the monitors’ flickering light. I could feel an emptiness in my head, in my chest, in my feet. I was hollow.
I woke up from the dream, shuddering in a pile of puke. I’d blacked out, passed out, and vomited. I was hungover, and my chest was so tight that it wasn’t letting me take a breath in. I was sweating, shaking, and nauseated. Sally came up and licked my hand. She leaned into me, a generous affectionate quirk of her breed. I grabbed onto her fur and hugged her and wept.
Over the next two weeks, I had several more dreams in which I’d wake up as other people. I was never anyone extraordinary. I awoke as the guy at the convenience store most of the time, although once I was a tax attorney. All the pyrotechnics of the previous year’s hallucinations had drained my brain of its imaginative sizzle. My dreams were boring, each one having a distinct moment of me sitting in a chair in the dark feeling empty. I could wake up as anyone. I was interchangeable as a personality; what I thought was me seemed to be inconsequential and could be used to fill up any life. There was nothing special about me; I was a fungible soul.
Who I was never mattered in these dreams. At the end of them I’d always end up by myself in a tiny room: storage closets, confession booths, walk-in freezers. Alone and stuck somewhere dark and quiet. I’d wake up shaking and crying after each one. I called them banal-mares. I didn’t tell anyone about them. I didn’t want anyone to think I was going crazy again.
Through an odd confluence of events, I ended up using the office belonging to one of my professors. He was on sabbatical and I had a key, so instead of bunking with four other graduate students in the tiny broom closets they called offices, I hung out in his office, with its shelves of signed first editions and his fancy computer. I retreated to that office often. It had a little partition that separated the front part of the office from the back part, so during my mandatory office hours, I could have the door open and hide back in the computer area. The lazier students would look in, not see me, and leave. It was the perfect way of not doing my job while doing my job.
One morning I was hiding behind the partition. I had a hangover and had woken up to a panic attack. There was something going on with my right ear. An infection was building up in there and gave me stabbing pains, one of those pains where you can feel the exact diameter of the infected canal. I didn’t have health insurance, but I could go to the student clinic for free. I just didn’t want them prescribing me medicines I couldn’t afford.
The phone rang, and before I thought better of it, I answered, cradling it against my uninfected left ear.
“Is this Dave? Dave MacLean?”
I didn’t recognize the voice.
“I heard you were back. It’s Jacob.”
I didn’t recognize the name. His voice was charged with excitement at being able to speak with me. We must’ve been friends. I asked him how he’d been.
“So Bonnie told me that I had to call and tell you this. You remember that paper I wrote? The one on cancer?”
He was a former student. For a second I wondered: had my brain not been shaken like an Etch A Sketch by Lariam, would I have remembered a former student’s paper? They turned in so many of them. I told him that yes, of course I remembered his paper on cancer.
“Well, I got it,” he said. His voice broke a little. There was a manic edge to his excitement.
“The paper?” I asked.
“No. I got cancer,” he said. “I lost a testicle.”
“Oh.”
“I thought you’d think that was funny.” Jacob’s voice was crackling now. “Bonnie and I laughed a lot about it.”
Jacob ended the call by asking me to come down to the Double Eagle, where he waited tables. He promised he’d get me half-priced appetizers and we could catch up.
It was nice to know that I was the kind of teacher that students liked and in whom they wanted to confide. It was one of the talents I found that I had: I was a good teacher. But I was also the kind of person who my students were sure would find their cancer hilarious.
One night, I met Anne out for drinks. We had many. Then I went back to her house to check out her computer, which she said was acting all weird.
I woke up at two in Anne’s bed. She was wearing white cotton underwear. I told her I was scared. I told her that we couldn’t do this anymore.
She reminded me that we hadn’t done anything past hold each other.
Crying, I told her I was messed up and she was dodging a bullet.
I drove home. The pain in my ear felt like there were bits of broken glass in there. At my house, I stood outside smoking and listening to Sally cracking o
pen pecans. The giant lumbering shapes of the Organ Mountains were visible even at night. You looked out, and where the stars weren’t, there were mountains. Sally pushed my hand with her nose, and I took her inside and dumped kibble in her bowl. Then I drank myself to sleep.
The second week of October, the pain got so bad that I finally went to the doctor and begged for a path to wellness paved with cheap generics. She wrote me a prescription for antibiotics for the infection and OxyContin for the pain. She told me I shouldn’t drink with either of the medications. OxyContin was a narcotic, she’d advised me, and when mixed with alcohol it could be deadly.
On October 16, 2003, the clock ticking inside my body went off. I took three of the Oxys, drank a bottle of wine, and had a tsunami-sized panic attack. My body knew the one-year anniversary was here. My chest was so tight that I could barely breathe. My heart thrummed at a hummingbird’s pace. My thoughts whirled around. I was drunk. I was numb with painkillers. I paced around the house. I shoved my fingers deep into my throat and threw up everything until my stomach convulsed air.
I called my parents. I opened another wine bottle. I called my sisters. I took another pill. I called Jon and Melissa, my friends from college. I had a cordless phone and spent hours spinning through the rooms, spending money I didn’t have on long-distance calls. I needed to have reasons not to kill myself.
I asked my family and friends, why should I try and do anything if I could just lose it all again? It was futile. I’d ramble on about Sisyphus, the mythic figure whose punishment in hell was to push a rock up a hill, and then right as he was about to get it to the top, he’d slip, and the rock would roll down to the bottom again. If Sisyphus had the choice, he would stop pushing the rock, right? Who in their right minds would continue to push the rock up the hill voluntarily when they knew that they were going to fail? I had spent the last year pasting together a passing resemblance to myself, and at any moment I could wake up and not know who I was and have to start this all over again, without even the memory of how I had done it. Why not commit suicide, if this was the case? I’d get talked down by each phone call, ending it by assuring the person that I was all right and hanging up the phone.
Then I’d punch in someone else’s digits. I was out of wine and had switched to beer. If I could lose everything at any moment, why not just die at a moment of my choosing? I barked into the phone. What if it wasn’t the Lariam? I asked. What if I was wired wrong? I didn’t want to have to read all those books again. Hurt somebody like Anne again. Go through this carousel of shit again. The people on the other end of the phone told me it might look dark right now, but it was going to get brighter soon. I replied that it’d get dark again after that brightness. People on the other end of the phone said that there were those in the world who had it much worse than I did, and that I, of all people, should know this. I felt so out of control that suicide was attractive. I was told that what I lacked was a global historical perspective of suffering. I wanted a gun big enough to guarantee an eradication of each and every one of my brain cells.
I was drunk, inconsolable, and my fingers stunk of vomit. Life felt like a too-long race, all spent running in wet concrete, each year a little deeper in: toes, knees, pelvis, chest, neck, death. I’d seen God, hadn’t I? I’d seen the earth in four dimensions, been to a meeting of angels. I had been shown that there was just darkness and space and failure. If my hallucinations meant anything, they said that I wasn’t getting into any afterlife. Suicide seemed the logical choice.
Sally walked with me all through that night, her wet nose pushing at my hand if I stopped pulling at her ears or scratching her head. Pet the dog, a voice inside of me yelled. Pet the damn dog.
I had a billion voices in my head, all clamoring for attention. Everyone I loved was in other time zones, and they were getting tired; they had work the next day. They told me that things would get better. My brain was indefatigable. The noise of it all was deafening. The chaotic crest of an orchestra tuning up combined with the sonic dissonance of an avalanche of radios, all caught between stations. I drank some more.
I noticed suddenly that the pain in my ear was gone.
I missed it.
The pain had been something concrete, something that tied me to this world. I missed the pain that I’d started the day complaining about.
“Isn’t that just like you,” I said.
I woke up on the foldout bed of a sofa in a living room. Not mine. Through the sliding patio doors I watched two small brown birds ducking their heads into a puddle, raising their beaks, shivering themselves dry. Outside, everything was so green. A machine rattled and exhaled in another room, and all at once the world smelled of coffee. It was October 17, 2003, and although I had no idea where I was or how I’d ended up here, I still knew who I was.
And I had a massive headache.
I was still in my jeans and shirt, socks, and shoes. There was a chunk of ice in my chest where the anxiety had been. I stood up, made the bed, and then folded it back into itself. It collapsed neatly into the sofa with a thunk.
My friend Jenn came in through the front door brushing dirt off her shorts; she had a paperback creased between her fingers and a giant coffee mug. I was at her house. It was a half mile away from mine. I’d been at this house before. I knew where I was.
She refilled her mug and poured one for me, and then we went and sat outside. Pine trees surrounded her house, and it was so isolated; it felt like a place burrowed deeper into the world. Across the street there was a pasture, and two horses calmly grazed. I wanted to feed them something, to have them eat from my outstretched palm and feel their floppy lips and the hot breath from their nostrils. Instead I sipped the bitter coffee and sat there for a half hour by my friend and watched the horses nicker and graze. I stuck two cigarettes into my mouth, lit them, and passed one over to my friend.
We said nothing. The ice in my chest was heavy, but the pine trees and the coffee and the cement slab under me all presented themselves as miracles. My car wasn’t there. Jenn had come and picked me up at my place in the middle of the night. She was a miracle as well. The fact that my brain hadn’t reset again, that I wasn’t hallucinating or strapped down to a table, was disconcerting to me. The fear of going crazy isn’t the same as going crazy, though it feels similar. Being crazy is easier than being afraid of going crazy; in fact, it’s enviable. The hospital was awful, but there they put straps on me to keep me from injuring myself. If I was crazy, everyone else would make decisions for me, for what was in my best interest. I had no such protections anymore.
Except for Jenn and all the other people who listened to me that night as my brain unspooled. The kindness of a place to sleep, a cup of coffee in the morning, and silence as we watched the horses graze: unfathomable gifts.
The smell of the trees on that day is still with me.
I started going to a shrink. She was the cheapest shrink in Las Cruces. I was spending a lot of money on cigarettes and alcohol, and didn’t have much cash left over to spend on the reasons I was smoking and drinking so much. Here were two substances that allowed me to control the way I felt. Nothing else in my life gave me the kind of comfort that that control gave to me. I was putting packs of cigarettes and fifths of bourbon on my Discover card and then paying only the monthly minimum—treating mounting debt like another utility, something that was an unavoidable part of keeping myself sane.
The shrink I went to was in her early sixties and was partial to lengthy sheer scarves, which floated around her when she walked. She worked with people with post-traumatic stress disorder, which she diagnosed me with during our first phone call.
She apologized to me on the day of our first appointment because her dog had been needy that morning, and she hoped it was okay that he was going to be with us.
I told her it was fine, that if I could, I’d take Sally to restaurants and to the movies with me.
The shrink laughed and opened up a side door from which the dog popped out.
&nb
sp; Her dog’s name was Allegra.
“Like the medication?” I asked.
“It’s Italian for happiness.” She grimaced.
The dog was black and white, about forty pounds, and was missing its left front leg. Allegra hopped over to me and smelled my pants as I rubbed his head.
As the shrink settled into the opposite couch, she explained that she had an intake form with a list of questions to go over, but first she wanted me to explain in my own words why I was seeking help.
I told her the story of waking up in a train station. By the second sentence I was crying. Fifteen minutes in, and I was sobbing convulsively. By the time I finished, the hour was over.
We saved the form for the next time.
Las Cruces is famous for its green chiles, or, more specifically, it’s adjacent to a place called Hatch that’s famous for its green chiles. Long, spicy, and sweet things about half the length of a banana. When the harvest came in, everything ground to a halt. The peppers are roasted in black propane-fired tumblers, usually a little bigger than the size of the man who stands next to them spinning the black handle attached to the drum. Grocery stores, gas stations, farmers’ markets, restaurants, and bars would each put a roaster out in their respective parking lots and sell the chiles by the bagful. The air in Las Cruces in the fall is thick with the sweet and burnt smell of them.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me Page 16