The Lost Weekend

by Charles Jackson

  No one knew this in all the world better than he did. But no one else in all the world knew, either, why he would do this, or what he would get out of it. What if he did end up in this chair again, in this same crazed state? The hours of respite were worth it even if they flung him back worse than he was now—and besides, he lost all track of that fact during the respite hours. The curse of the thing, and the blessing too, was that he promised himself to take one drink, or at the most a couple, only to relieve the fright of his tension and stave off collapse; he took it as a medicine; and then, the medicine in him, he was whole again, ready once more to start out. An endless chain, of course; a vicious circle if ever there was one; a helpless series of processes in which the original disorder creates a second which aggravates the first and leads to a third, a third which makes inevitable and necessary a fourth, and so on till the nadir of such a day as today is reached—and this is not the bottom, this unhuman torture of now, this wanting to start all over again, even though he well knew that a fifth depth and a sixth were yet to be sounded. He knew all that, he was no fool like other people (they who believed his promises when he knew better than to believe them himself); and knowing it, he yet craved the drink that would bring the whole ruin down upon him again.

  And what of the passing and lost, the uncounted and unrecoverable days used up in those depths, the time that went down the drain and never came back? What thing was there in all the world that could ever repay you for those days? Who knew besides yourself the panic-feeling of stopping suddenly in the middle of a morning’s fright to ask: What day is it? Often what month, what season? To ask, but to ask no one but yourself; because you could not have admitted you didn’t know. Had you lost track of ten days, or one? Not only lost track, but not had them at all. Was it March or September? And wasn’t that using up life frightfully fast, or—worse than fast—unaware? Time was all you had, all anyone had, and you weren’t counting, you let it slip by as if the unused day or week might offer itself over again tomorrow. But it didn’t and couldn’t—it had been used even though you hadn’t used it. Had you no better use for precious time than that? What are you if the chief good and market of your time be but to drink and sleep? Hadn’t you in youth often cried out what a day to be alive? And how many days had there been, since, when you weren’t even able to long for death? Why ask how many? You could never say, you had lost count too long ago. The lost lost days, so many that you were something a good deal less than your thirty-three years, many months less, whole gaps and periods of your life taken out in blank—most shameful and wanton waste of all, because nothing could ever give them back again. Compensation for your loss, recovery of time itself, lay only in re-entering that blank once more where time was uncounted and time didn’t count, drinking yourself out of the middle of the week and into your timeless time-out.

  The telephone had been ringing for minutes again. Was somebody calling him from Budapest? Was it Betty in Cleveland or Gösta in Borås? He thought of the calls he had made in one hour of one afternoon (and immediately forgotten) to Santa Fé, Chicago, Berlin, New Orleans, Murray Bay and Villefranche, how the letters came in, some a few days, some weeks later, asking what had become of him, hadn’t he been just about to leave or sail, had something delayed him, they had had no further word and were waiting. The first of these letters had puzzled him, he didn’t know what they were talking about; then Wick had presented him with the ’phone bill (before the other letters came in from abroad) and pleaded how could he, how could he.… How could he? It had been an inspiration of the earlier drinks; it gave him a sense of power, he supposed, to pick up the telephone—just like that—and ring up Kees or Poupée and surprise them by saying he was coming to see them. He was lonely or something, he did it with the best will in the world, the friendliest motives—but how could he explain that to Wick? How could he, really, because he didn’t really know, or remember.

  The ’phone had stopped ringing, but he knew that in the next room it was merely gathering itself to stab again. What of it? He would not be there, he wasn’t here.… He sat in the tub, both taps running full, getting ready for a long idle Sunday morning bath before Sunday-school. The din of the water was pleasant, the steam rose and obscured the tiny Dutch scenes repeated endlessly in the bathroom wallpaper. Someone was calling him. He turned off the faucets and shouted “Yes?” There was no one. The noise of the water running full had created new imaginary sounds in his ear, as it always did, sounds in which someone was forever calling his name, or pounding on the wall, or rapping on the bathroom door itself. He sat back and turned on the taps again. He busied himself with the soap and washcloth; and again, over the din of running water, he heard his name called. Did someone want to get in, was he wanted on the telephone? He shut off the taps and yelled “What is it!” … It was the telephone ringing.

  Hadn’t she had enough? What was she trying to do, anyway? What did she mean, what did she think she was doing! He tried to think it out, calmly. He went over it all again, trying to think if he had it right. She and Wick had been in touch with each other and Helen was trying to keep tabs on him. Wick had stayed on at the farm, the whole long weekend, as planned. He didn’t want to come back in the middle of it because he knew what he would come back to. Helen was trying to get hold of him and perhaps help him get back in shape before Wick came home. She would keep on ’phoning until he answered. If he was out, he wouldn’t stay out forever. Not if he was still alive, or out of jail. He’d be bound to be in at least once when she called. But what if she tried some other means besides ’phoning, what if she came over here? No, she had done that this noon and it hadn’t got her anywhere, she wouldn’t do it again, she couldn’t, God, would she? And if she did, what then? If she found some means of getting in—! Nothing in this or any world could make him face Helen today. Not even her opening the door could make him do it. He wouldn’t be responsible if she tried. All he wanted to do was die here alone, without anyone, because he could never explain, he could never even say goodbye. If she tried to get at him again, tried to help him or reach him—well, let her try, he wouldn’t be here, alive, if she should succeed.

  The excursions into the past (willful and deliberate before, because they were all he had) had become spontaneous, the automatic reflex of his anxiety and over-taut nerves.… He lay in his bed at home, sleepless, alert, for in another hour or so it would be Christmas morning and he had to know, somehow, if what he wanted most in all the world was under the tree. Wick was sound asleep beside him and would not wake until wakened. The sky outside the window was so brilliant and clear that he was sure it was daylight, or would be daylight soon. The stars glittered hard and fast as if on a blue ceiling, a ceiling that was surely bluer now than it had been half an hour before or even ten minutes ago. Tense and rigid in his bed (for it was very cold) he gazed at the sky and wondered how long before it would really be dawn.… Now and again he heard noises from outside, the crackling sharp noises of the bitter cold. The wheels of a wagon ground and groaned in the icy street, and then came the hard ringing rattle of milk-bottles clinking together in their steel basket and the sound of the milkman going up the walk—grutch, gruntch, grutch, gruntch along the solid snow. He listened. The wagon started and went on again, and the frozen wheels gave out hard, slow, but musical sounds as they moved on, like the sound of pendant panes of glass being knocked together—like the little Chinese wind-bells that used to hang on the side porch, but exaggerated, now, and harsh. The sounds continued as the wagon went up the street, but always they seemed to be just below the window, so sharp and clear did they ring upon the frosty air. Everything was intensified a hundred times: the stillness of the house, his awareness, the noises outside, the cold, the glittering fast stars, his anxiety and need to know.… He got out of bed, being careful to put the covers back over Wick, and stole downstairs. The house was dark, the shades in the living-room were drawn, he stumbled over something on the floor. He listened, breathless. His mother slept in the downstair
s bedroom just off the living room. Through the closed door he heard her bed creak. Then she said, “Who’s there?” He did not answer. “Is that you, Don? Shame on you!” There was a pause. “Now listen. It’s under the tree. You can take one look, and then I want you to go back to bed and stay there till you’re called, do you hear?” All this low, not loud, she didn’t want to wake the others any more than he did. “Don’t turn the lights on. Just pull up the shades. You can see enough.” He picked his way carefully across the room and raised the shades. Then he came back and looked at the tree. On the floor, right in front, was the fat oblong package wrapped in thin tissue-paper. He picked it up and took it over to the light. By its size and weight he knew at once this was it. He pressed the tissue-paper close to the book with his fingers and read the title through the white blur: Idylls of the King. It was the same as the large illustrated copy he had coveted so long from the Fine Books shelf at the public library. “Hurry up,” his mother said, “now march!” He put the book back and went upstairs. He crawled into bed beside Wick and took his hand, as they always did when they were ready for sleep. Now let Christmas come whenever it was ready, let it take its time, let all the other presents wait, the book could wait too, now that he knew he had it.…

  Curious that he could have taken to drink, who after his first communion refused to take part in the service again because he hated the taste of the wine. Odd that he of all people should ever have turned into a drinker, he who had been not only bored but actually impatient with the chapter on the evils of alcohol and what it did to the brain-cells, in the 6th-grade Hygiene book—impatient because all this stuff would certainly never apply to him in a thousand years and it was a waste of time for them all and not very nice besides. Nice people didn’t talk about such things or have such things happen to them, not in their town or among their kind of people. Nice people didn’t go into saloons, nobody he knew ever did, except he himself once, yes at the age of fourteen, as a sacrifice and gesture of patriotism. He and Eddie Richmond were distributing posters through the downtown stores during the Boy Scout drive for the Liberty Loan, he was covering one side of the street, Eddie the other, when he noticed that Eddie had skipped McGill’s saloon. He crossed over to Eddie’s side and they talked about it. No sir, Eddie wouldn’t go in there, not in a saloon. But not even on account of the Liberty Loan? Not even for the Allies? No sir! Well, he would, then; and he did, knowing Eddie would marvel at his courage and tell all the others. He walked straight into the dark foul-smelling place and said “Mr. McGill, can I hang one of these up in your window?” He felt wonderful doing it, all the more so because the two or three men standing at the bar with their tiny glasses of whisky looked at him sheepishly; and when he pushed the two half-doors aside and came out, he knew proudly that he would never again in all his life be inside a saloon but this was all right. He didn’t even care if anyone saw him coming out, in fact he hoped they would, hadn’t he done it for the Liberty Loan?

  Was that funny, could you laugh at it now? Let others, if they could, but it was heartbreaking only. He thought almost with tears of that priggish self-righteous lad walking through the swinging doors, so innocent, so unaware that someday— Heartbreaking hell! The thought angered him instead. Little prick, that’s what he was! Smug little bastard who— He sat up suddenly, his senses straining, his nerves on edge. The telephone had stopped ringing. But not only that, he now realized it hadn’t been ringing for some time. Was she on her way over here again? He looked at the clock.

  It was ten minutes past five. Had the day really gone, had it really managed to pass, he was still sane, still alive? The room was cool, the sunlight had long since left the carpet, though he hadn’t realized it till now. He turned to look out the window. The sun had withdrawn also from the apartment building across the way, it was getting dark. Now what? What about the night, how was he going to survive it?—for he knew that sleep, in this keyed-up state, was beyond possibility. Or was Helen going to arrive and attempt again to rescue him from that night? He knew, knowing her, remembering all those times (O times!), that’s just what would happen, she was on her way even now. Never! He would face a nightmare night of devils and creeping horror and shrieking empty bottles twenty times more dreadful than the dreadful day, rather than face Helen, rather than open the door to her. Let her ring the bell, let her ring her head off, he was beyond reach now. He clutched the arms of the chair, fixed his eye on the door, and waited for the bell to ring.

  Was there a limit to what he could endure? It seemed not. He was more vulnerable to suffering—and at the same time, paradoxically, he had a greater capacity for it—than anyone he knew; and this was no idle or egotistic boast, something he merely fancied to be true and was proud of because it set him apart, spoke of a superior sensitivity or sensibility. An occasion or period of suffering in his past which, reckoned now in perspective, was a mere incident, one out of many in a long chain, would have stood out in the average life as a major crisis, perhaps indeed the only one, a moment where the victim had reached a peak or depth from which recovery was a lifelong process. But such moments, such peaks and depths, were his very pattern—natural, it seemed, perhaps even necessary, to his development. Why had he not been destroyed by all that happened to him? How is it he could take it over and over again and yet again? What capacity, vitality, or resilience did he have that others did not? Was it that his imagination laid hold of that suffering and transmuted it to experience, an experience he did not profit from, true, but experience all the same: a realization of who and what he was, a fulfillment of self? Was he trying to find out, in this roundabout descent to destruction, what it was all about; and would he, at the final and ultimate moment, know?

  So his whole history had tended. He had been led on through good and bad, fair and foul, by nothing more than his own insatiable appetite for experience, an appetite part curiosity and part desire (but never three-parts coward). Not for nothing had he glanced up again and again from the bed to look in the mirror and see what a weeping boy looked like, a stricken boy weeping his heart away, that time he first learned his father had gone off and left them all and would never come home again (it was an important and awful moment, his childish but native prescience told him it was maybe the most important moment in his life, and he had to see what it looked like, even while his heart was breaking). Not for nothing had he stood by, when he might so easily have escaped by deceit or treachery or merely walking out, and let the fraternity disaster come down upon him, come down with all the nightmare forces of evil that nearly wrecked his life at the very start. Not for nothing had he ignored his secret morning hemorrhages until it was too late, then embraced both the prospect and the actuality of the long years in the tuberculosis sanatorium as if they offered a rich and rewarding experience. (Childish of course; anything but adult; self-dramatization, sure!—but who was more important or interesting to one than oneself?—and perhaps because of that very thing, that dual nature of participant and spectator, he had never gone down truly to the bottom, never gone under entirely, not yet.) He had come out of that dark confinement as he had gone in, wholehearted, and knowing more about himself than it was given to many others to know.

  Had it done him any good? Had he got anything out of it? He needn’t credit himself with self-knowledge as though it were a rare and special virtue; or, if he must, for Christ’s sake let him keep it to himself. For what was the good of knowing he was a fool and an adolescent if he went on being an adolescent and fool even more than when he didn’t know it? That kind of wisdom wasn’t virtue nor that kind of virtue wisdom. Neither had prevented the floundering as before, nor deterred him from the other things, realer and less real than illness, he had faced or gone into: the dangers, the dubious pleasures, the serious undertakings, the disappointments, the trying-anything-once; the mistaken loves and the terrible mistakes in love; the thousand times he had seemed to go deliberately out of his way to get in a jam, while others skirted these same troubles almost without kno
wing it, almost by instinct, their natural protective sense the very opposite of that instinct of his which led him inevitably and willy-nilly to the trap. Was it really self-destruction; or was it a kind of misguided self-search, self-quest in a blind alley, an untimely extension of the interminable slow pain of growing up, retarded, even cherished, too long? “You are like a plant of slow growth,” Anna had written him once (in words he couldn’t have used in a thousand years), “but the flower will be beautiful.” Slower than many, later than most.…

  Too late?

  Too late, too late, by default; he knew it and accepted it in his helplessness, even though he might protest it with passion: too late because there was at last a limit to what you could endure, and that limit at last would be reached tonight. Physically alone he was finished. The day of terror would break him down into madness at last, when the day was over; his brain would snap and the one rash and final thing would be done.

  But oh, this is not the end he had imagined for himself as a kid! or even at thirty. To the adolescent boy, dreaming romantically of the gifted tormented men who had thrown their lives away, suicide had been a glamorous thing, a gallant flinging down of the glove, a refusal to submit, to conform, to endure, a demonstration that the spirit with honor is unwilling to go on except in its own way: almost a gesture debonair.

  Romantic rubbish!—had he ever believed it, even as a kid? An end like this was abject, nothing more; cringing, groveling, ignoble, contemptible, vile; a way out shameful and ashamed (could you open the door to Helen?); unbecoming, immoral, worse than unmanly. But you could reach a point, too, where the body rebelled though the spirit still stirred, where physical endurance was nearing its limit, where you no longer actually had the strength to care how abject you were, how base or despicable; and that point had been reached hours ago. The painful day had unmanned him, and all that was left was the small weak will (but will all the same—all he had left) to end the despair as well as the pain, somehow, someway. A bottle would do it; but the bottle was empty. A window, then; or a knife.