The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  “A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing,” says the Consul’s half brother, not so fond of sobriety himself. We see this self-knowledge lodged in the novel like a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle. It didn’t save anyone.

  Dave and I threw a miracle berry party that January. This meant everybody got a little purple pill that made everything turn sweet. We served lemons and limes and grapefruits. You could bite into them whole, like apples. They tasted like candy. It was the middle of winter, and my kitchen was hot with the bodies of graduate students. I drank beer that tasted like chocolate, and wine that tasted like syrup, and at a certain point the night flickered into blackout. People were there and then they weren’t; it was just me and Dave in bed. Then it was me and Dave in bed, but it was morning. This was the first real blackout I’d had with him—the first time I’d let myself go that far.

  After a blackout, memory deals out bits of the night before like a partial poker hand. You get pieces of the picture, but never find out exactly what hand you played. I asked Dave what had happened: Had I embarrassed myself in front of everyone, or was it only obvious after they’d gone?

  “Only after they’d gone,” he said. “I think.”

  This was good news.

  “I was scared,” he said. “You weren’t making sense.”

  Dave wasn’t usually someone who said things like I was scared. But there it was. I’d been muttering, upset, incomprehensible. When we got up to clean the kitchen, it was cold, and my backyard was glazed with frost beyond my attic windows, glinting in the pure harsh light of winter. A squirrel had gotten himself to the top of a telephone pole and didn’t seem able to get down again. I thought he looked terrified. Dave thought maybe he was just triumphant. The winter light was gorgeous, sharp and crystalline, but I didn’t feel entitled to it. It was like the Consul, as Lowry described him: “He had lost the sun: it was not his sun.”

  Meanwhile, the kitchen was a mess. Everything that had been sweet was simply itself again, shriveled or crusted. Plastic red cups were everywhere. When Dave lifted a spoon from the table and the paper plate beneath it lifted as well, sticky with wine, it looked like the plate was floating in air. Dave saw the floating plate; I saw the stain of wine. He wanted to take a picture: Levitation! I was already thinking: Will I drink again tonight? And where? And when?

  When I pictured Peter’s black eye, from his fall, I tried to imagine how he’d struck his face, or where else he was bruised, and wondered who was taking care of him. I wondered if he’d taken a night off getting drunk—maybe a Monday. It was as if Peter and I were still inside something together, something that had to do with the drinking. In that way, we were more alike than I would ever be like Dave.

  I was pregnant when we threw our miracle berry party, though I didn’t know it yet. When I took a pregnancy test a few weeks later, in a bathroom tucked deep in the labyrinthine corridors of a massive Gothic castle on campus, the plus sign made something bloom in me: joy and terror at once. Dave met me after one of my seminars, which I’d spent twitchy and distracted, listening to other people talk about postcolonial departures from traditional lyric forms. It was early February: flinty skies over weathered stone, grass trodden and defeated under patches of snow. Dave took my gloved hand in his gloved hand and asked me what I wanted to do. He said: “I will stick by you no matter what you choose.”

  It surprised me: not that he would stick by me, but that he was approaching the moment as a choice. I couldn’t imagine having a baby—not right then, just a few months into our love, when everything was just beginning. The fact that Dave was willing, that he was saying he would summon himself for that, for a lifetime of parenting together, made the possibility actual: I pictured him teaching a small floppy-haired boy to play the guitar. I pictured him listening to our daughter’s make-believe story, asking her questions: How did the little squirrel learn to be less afraid? Once I talked to him, I was more aware of the loss than I had been on my own: the loss of a creature we had created with our bodies and then created again, with our conversation that day in the brittle chill, putting our imaginations toward the possibility of a shared life.

  Once I realized I was pregnant, I was repulsed by how much I’d been drinking. I pictured a not-yet-baby built of gin, with little fin feet and cauliflower hands, pickled inside me. But I didn’t stop. If I was going to have an abortion, what difference did it make? It still made me sick, picturing the fetus like a tiny ice cube cloaked in whiskey. I was nervous about the recovery—afraid of seeming needy, or unappealing; afraid of being wanted less. How long would we have to wait to have sex again?

  On the morning I got the abortion, Dave held my hand as we walked past the protesters outside Planned Parenthood—elderly, in lawn chairs, holding the same poster board they always held, a webby mess of tissue and blood. I was angry at them, for all the women they’d spooked and shamed, but I also felt a sorrow I couldn’t account for. It had to do with the way they spent so many of their days on these lawn chairs, grieving.

  When I got out, three hours later, I was grateful for Dave’s hand, grateful for the smell and solidity of him—the grain of his beard stubble against my cheek. He hugged me, hard, for long moments, in the middle of the waiting room. Years later, he wrote a poem that ended with that same memory of our bodies together: “They kiss each other in the middle of a waiting room and cry, / because they are not thinking / of how they will be seen.” I couldn’t remember kissing in the waiting room, or crying, but I could remember precisely what it had been like: not thinking of being seen. I could remember his embrace as enfolding, absolute.

  A month after the abortion, I had heart surgery to correct persistent tachycardia—episodes of rapid, gratuitous heartbeats that I was told would slowly wear out my heart before its time. I wasn’t going to fall down dead if it wasn’t treated. But I might not live as long. This was interesting to me: I wasn’t saving my life now; I was giving more years to a future version of myself. I was preserving her. It was the second time I was asking Dave to take care of me, right on the heels of the abortion—after nights I’d spent lying awake in bed beside him, twisting with the hot swirled knot of a pain I hadn’t quite expected. When he woke, he rubbed my back, and whispered into my neck. There was something I liked about the dynamic: being cared for, being understood as vulnerable. But it made me ashamed to find any part of it appealing.

  The night before the surgery, I was careful to drink only a few glasses of wine. This seemed prudent, to make sure there wasn’t too much stray booze running through my system when I went into surgery the next morning. Before we went to bed, I told Dave I was nervous: What if it didn’t work? What if something went wrong and I ended up with a pacemaker? I’d been told this was unlikely but possible.

  What I saw on Dave’s face then was an expression I hadn’t seen before: a hardening, as if the blood had cooled into a solid gel beneath his skin. “You shouldn’t worry,” he said. “What good would it do?”

  I was suddenly embarrassed, like I had done something wrong by worrying, or burdened him by speaking it. I didn’t say anything more.

  After I woke up from surgery, the surgeons told me it hadn’t worked. My cardiologist came to my hospital bed with a bottle of pills—a beta-blocker called Sotalol—that I was supposed to start taking instead. The drug was strong enough that I had to stay in the hospital for three more days while they tracked its effect on my heart. When I noticed a little martini glass on the side, with an X through it, I immediately hid my dread behind casual questions: Was this pro forma? I asked hopefully. Just a generally-not-a-good-idea-to-be-drinking-on-medication situation? Or was it serious? I wanted the cardiologist to bottom-line it: Could I drink or not?

  The doctor suggested I not drink for a few months and we’d see how it went. Sure. And maybe I could also spend a few months never using my hands. I was frustrated not just by the prospect of not drinking (anything at all??), but also by the idea that this wouldn’t be a big deal, that we could jus
t “wait and see.”

  Dave spent nights with me in the hospital. He brought me bread pudding, our two plastic forks sticking out of the wobbly vanilla loaf, and he learned which drawer at the nurse’s station held extra stashes of the graham crackers I liked. He made them sacred, those hospital days. But there were certain things that confused me. When I was discharged and he came to pick me up, for example, he called from the car. “Can you just meet me down here?” he said. “I don’t want to park.” I’d been in a hospital bed for five days, but didn’t want to ask for extra help; it seemed like I’d already asked for too much of it. So I hoisted my duffel bag on my shoulder and came down—had to sit down in the elevator, right on the cold dirty floor, so I wouldn’t faint. When I got in the car, I said nothing. I could remember the look on Dave’s face when I’d told him I was scared—before the surgery—and I didn’t want to see it again.

  Once I got home from the hospital, I decided the doctor’s advice about not drinking was just advice. She would have been more adamant and less casual if it wasn’t. It was advice I decided not to follow. We could just see, I thought. This meant trying to cut back on drinking, failing to cut back on drinking, and not taking my heart medication whenever I’d drunk a lot, which seemed like due diligence. I also Googled “Sotalol” alongside every type of alcohol I could think of, to see if I could find reassurance that it was okay, or else a warning dire enough to make me stop drinking entirely.

  About a month later, my cardiologist ordered something called a Holter monitor to test if my medication was working. It was a box I wore around my neck for twenty-four hours, attached to EKG monitors stuck to my chest that measured my heart rate. I told myself I wouldn’t drink for the day I was wearing it. I didn’t want to fuck up the results. I was stuffed with Internet wisdom: “Drinking alcohol affects how well Sotalol works,” the New Zealand Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Authority had said—in bolded letters, quoting the drug company—and I believed them. If I drank with my Holter monitor, I imagined the data would be incriminating evidence, my heart rate spiking around twilight. But then I went to a reading on campus and it seemed weird, almost ungrateful, not to have one glass of wine afterward—it was free!—and before I knew it, I was sitting at a bar downtown with a friend, drinking a martini with my weird little heart contraption dangling around my neck.

  A week later, my cardiologist called to say the Sotalol wasn’t working. I had to stay in the hospital for another three days while they tested the new drug, whose bottle also had a little martini glass with an X over it. So I switched drugs, kept drinking, kept Googling—this time with a new drug in the search bar: “Flecainide + alcohol + death.”

  That spring, Dave found out he had been accepted at the Writers’ Workshop, and we flew to Iowa to look at apartments—giddy at figuring out the contours of our new life in a new town. We’d been together about five months, and his acceptance felt like fate cosigning on our giddiness. For Dave, a child of the Boston suburbs, it was his first time west of the Mississippi. We rented a second-floor apartment in a white farmhouse down the street from the local Co-op, only a few minutes’ walk from where I’d lived five years earlier, for that first year of bonfires and blackouts. This was a different sort of thrill, making a home together so quickly—like putting down a huge bet on a promising pocket pair in Texas Hold’em before you know the flop, the turn, or the river. I was ready to return to Iowa with the things I’d wanted, back when I lived there the first time: a man and a bit of success, two measures of value I’d always understood as linked. Dave was elated at the thought of spending two years writing poems—as opposed to writing about poems, which he’d been doing in our doctoral program—and excited to move to a town that didn’t hold eight years of his past.

  In those days I was editing my novel, still drinking, and still writing my heavy-drinking character as a woman with whom I had nothing in common. My editor told me she wanted the novel to dramatize the possibility of recovery—as narrative tension, even if it got thwarted. What if I included an AA meeting, or even a stretch of sobriety?

  I’d never been to an AA meeting, and couldn’t really imagine one. I pictured folding chairs in a church basement, Styrofoam cups of steaming coffee. That was it. But I didn’t want to go to one for research. Perhaps some part of me was nervous about what I’d hear. So I summoned a vague sketch, and wrote about Tilly watching people who were part of something—making coffee, trading phone numbers, swapping life stories—and deeming herself a failure in comparison, because her sobriety consisted of memorizing the TV schedule and watching the clock. That was all I could grant sobriety. Even Mondays without drinking had been bad enough.

  Tilly goes to the AA meeting with her adult son, who walks out partway through because he doesn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be there either—in the scene, or writing it. As Tilly watches her son leave, she thinks about the difference between them: that he could walk out of the room because he didn’t live in the world she lived in, a world defined by ceaseless longing. I wasn’t yet sure which world I lived in, whether I was someone who could stand up and awkwardly pick her way between the folding chairs, walk out on thirst like a lover I was done with, or whether I had to stay in the room—a room full of people who had to do something about their constant wanting.

  In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté—the clinician who worked with skid-row addicts in Vancouver—compares addicts to “hungry ghosts” on the Buddhist Wheel of Life: “creatures with scrawny necks, small mouths, emaciated limbs, and large, bloated, empty bellies.” Their bodies are physical expressions of that “aching emptiness” that drives addiction, what Maté describes as a search for “something outside ourselves to curb an insatiable appetite for relief or fulfillment.” But for Maté, addicts don’t have a monopoly on the quest: “They have much in common with the society that ostracizes them. In the dark mirror of their lives, we can trace the outlines of our own.”

  To argue that addiction holds a dark mirror up to more universal hungers isn’t a denial of its physical mechanisms—neurotransmitters and their adaptations—or a denial of chemical dependence as a discrete phenomenon with its own physiological reality. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the operative urges of addiction aren’t unrelated to desires that show up in everyone: the urge to court bliss, to dull pain, to find relief.

  For decades, much of the scientific research on addiction suggested a certain inevitability in its mechanisms—as if it operated outside of context, compelled by its own unique velocity. From the late sixties to the late eighties, the scientific studies that got the most press (and often the best funding) were the ones where caged animals were trained to give themselves drugs until they did so compulsively. One laboratory joke maintained that the definition of a drug was any substance that, when given to a rat, produced a journal article. Rats pushed the cocaine lever until they died.

  These journal articles eventually turned into household wisdom and after-school specials: “Cocaine Rat” was the title of a 1988 PSA video that showed a white rat gnawing pellets in desperation until it keeled over, its little claws fumbling in the air, its matted fur shadowed by the bars of its cage. “It’s called cocaine,” said the voice-over, “and it can do the same thing to you.”

  But the voice-over didn’t explain that these rats, the ones that pressed the coke lever until they died, were kept alone in bare white cages. They had injection apparatuses implanted in their backs. They were often starved. A few scientists eventually wondered: What if they were given some company? What if they were given something else to do? In the early eighties, these scientists designed Rat Park, a spacious plywood habitat painted with pine trees and filled with climbing platforms, running wheels, tin cans for hiding, wood chips for playing, and—most important—lots of other rats. The rats in that cage didn’t press the coke lever until they died. They had better things to do. The point wasn’t that drugs couldn’t be addictive, but that addiction was fueled by so much b
esides the drugs themselves. It was fueled by the isolation of the white cage, and by the lever as substitute for everything else.

  Most addicts don’t live in barren white cages—though some do, once they’ve been incarcerated—but many live in worlds defined by stress of all kinds, financial and social and structural: the burdens of institutional racism and economic inequality, the absence of a living wage. The original cover of George Cain’s Blueschild Baby featured a drawing of a black man tying off his arm with a strip of the American flag, popping out the veins for his next dose of heroin.

  “What was it that did in reality make me an opium eater?” Thomas De Quincey wondered in 1821. “Misery, blank desolation, abiding darkness.”

  Most addicts describe drinking or using as filling a lack. I once met a woman who described herself as a bucket that had sprung a leak, and she kept trying to fill it—with liquor, with affirmation, with love. David Foster Wallace once called booze “the interior jigsaw’s missing piece.” The leaky bucket and the missing puzzle piece are visions of Sedgwick’s “self thus self-construed as lack.” Though these circular statements of cause—you drink to fill the lack, but the drinking only deepens it—all raise the same question: Where does the lack come from?

  I could tell you a thousand and one stories about mine. I could tell you a story about the men in my family, as I’ve already started to—about my frequent-flier father, my godly brothers and their powerful reserve—and how a self comes into its shape by seeking. This is the depth-psychology fairy tale, airplane ticket stubs as smoking gun: Aha! But I’ve always distrusted the neatness of this story—dime-store psychoanalysis, turning wounds to tarot cards—or the ways it seemed to blame my relationship to substances on people who have spent my whole life loving me. My childhood was easier than most, and I ended up drinking anyway.