“I’m Al and I’m an addict. I’m here just simply ’cause I messed up and started smoking that damn ‘caine but I want to say to Mike on 9/11: I feel you, bro.”
“My name is Peter.”
“Hi Peter.”
“I think September 11 was an absolutely terrible thing,” Peter said. “I’m not American; I’m British. I want you to know I sympathize. I was out of the country at the time. I’m a chef and I wish I had never heard that you could smoke cocaine. I didn’t have any problem with snorting it.” He shook his head sadly. “I was on a private yacht when it happened, cooking for my employer and his guests. I can tell you that Mick Jagger was among the guests. I can tell you that everyone felt absolutely terrible about September 11. It affected us all. I don’t remember much about October.”
While Peter was speaking, I wondered, for the first time, how 9/11 had affected me. It was such a huge event. Everyone agreed on that. How could it not have had an impact on me? I was just as much a part of the world as anyone else, even if I felt pretty aloof sometimes. I breathed the same air as everyone else. Was I in denial about 9/11? I cast my mind back to that day four months earlier. Cat had woken me up. She’d been all excited.
“Something has finally happened!” she said. I dragged myself out of bed and over to the TV. As I watched the replay of the second plane hitting the tower my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it.
“Finally,” I said. “Finally something big has finally happened.”
“They say more planes are coming,” Cat told me. “They say Baltimore could be a target. Ohmigod look!” We stared fascinated at the TV. She turned the volume way up.
“And then,” I told the group. “Then I realized that this was a special day. I’d been planning to quit dope that day. I’d even written myself a note. But when 9/11 happened I thought, ‘Nothing matters now, the economy is probably fucked, no one will have to go to work again. I can get high today for sure.’ And I did, and a few months later I got arrested, and now I’m here.”
The guys around me sighed and nodded. It felt good to be in a place where people understood. I remembered telling Cash about how I felt that day and Cash saying he was going to call the FBI tip line and tell them I had expressed joy at 9/11. With friends like that…
“OK,” said Kirk when the last of us had spoken, “9/11 was tough for many of us. Especially those who lost loved ones. No one wants to minimize that. But, as tough as it was, we are here in 2002 now, and whatever got you started using, or made you use more, the simple fact is that now you can’t stop. You wouldn’t be here if you could.”
After group a number of us stood out in the cold smoking, gathered around the other Mike. He had emerged as a natural leader. I felt kind of good that we had the same name.
“I agree with everything Kirk said,” Mike was saying, “I mean…”
“Yeah.”
“Right on, Mike.” We felt an unfocused positivity. I found myself smiling. Looking back it’s hard for me to disentangle my feelings from the others’. Everyone was talking at once.
“Man, motherfuck dope.”
“Never again!”
“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”
“I do, and it was stupid.”
“One day at a time.”
“Everything’s gonna be fine.”
“The First Step, man, the First Step.”
“You use, you lose.”
“A day without a buzz…”
“Is like a day that never wuzz.”
“That ain’t right, man!”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
“Just keep your eyes on the First Step.”
“And your hands.”
“And your mouth.”
Addicts have thin boundaries. Or maybe we have elastic I’s. Huddled together in the cold smoking, I caught some of Marty’s feelings, and the other Mike caught some of mine. We were all mixed up together. It was kind of fun. I’d always secretly wanted to join the Army. Comrades, brothers. That night we all wobbled together on the rehab center patio, a single happy animal, starving hungry, horny, dying, smiling.
Togetherness therapy. For the next three weeks I went to group therapy sessions and smoked and ate four meals a day. We were all in it together. Together. With no drugs, the addicts huddled together and lost themselves in the crazy group animal. It cavorted around the lounge and the smoking patio and ate the hours until eventually we’d have to go to bed. Separately. I’d find myself lying in bed alone, zipped up in the tight envelope of my skin, and God only knows what I felt. Two weeks without drugs? Three? Some people never slept. Sneaked out at 2:00 a.m. to the lounge to talk to someone, anyone, everyone. You want to talk about food? Cars? Music? God? The talk went from your mouth into his ear out his mouth into your ear out your mouth into his ear—the talk went faster—you started remembering what his wife looks like and your loneliness woke up inside him and didn’t know where it was and wandered around and got happy. Talk faster. Faster.
It went too fast. The counselors looked worried. Tensions began to infect our group therapy sessions. People started burning out. The rodeo boy announced that he wasn’t an addict. “I never really liked ketamine.” He felt he was being held at the facility against his will. This was bad for morale. We lost two patients who left when they realized no one was going to stop them. Rodeo boy stayed. Al asked him bluntly why he didn’t just get the hell out if he wanted to so bad. Rodeo boy replied that he wanted to, but he just felt he couldn’t leave. He blamed other people for that feeling. I also had some feelings I knew weren’t mine. I nodded.
Over the course of several sessions, it slowly came out that Tony believed that he had killed someone and buried the body on a construction site in Indiana. Mike called Tony a show-off, and Tony responded by suggesting that the only friends of Mike’s who had perished in 9/11 were imaginary friends, and Karl had to cut group short. That upset Marty.
Every couple days, a senior patient would “graduate” and we’d have a little ceremony beating tom-toms and yelling and giving emotional speeches about the senior’s triumph. Mike was particularly good at the speeches.
“You will definitely make it,” he’d say, looking straight into the senior’s eyes. “You will definitely make it out there.”
A guy named Tom graduated at the beginning of my first week on the unit and was back at the end of my third week. He said his mistake was answering the phone without checking caller ID. A few senior patients didn’t graduate at all. Mike said that the staff had identified some patients as benefitting from a more intensive and extensive treatment regime. Mike was not one of them. He was at 95 percent.
By now Marty was telling everyone that the treatment center was one of the two worst he had ever attended. You weren’t supposed to use the Internet, but one of the patients somehow gained access to the counselors’ computer and downloaded and printed and passed around an article from a website saying that treatment centers were completely ineffective and that every single addict sent there relapsed except the ones who suffered only from “addiction hypochondria.” The counselors, all of whom were alumni of the center, presented themselves as evidence refuting these lies. Marty unexpectedly emerged as one of the article’s chief opponents.
“That’s crazy,” he scoffed. “Of course treatment works.”
There were two huge windows in the treatment center lounge. I stared out. A high, thin winter cloud was coming apart. Ten seconds. Twenty.
“Oh!”
“Freaking out a little, Mike?” Al sauntered in chuckling.
“No, uh, I was just zoning out a little…and…kind of surprised myself,” I said, getting up and pacing around. I felt frightened and embarrassed.
Because staring at the sky my eyes had started to get dry. Then they dried completely out like bones. Like dice. And the looking that was in them wasn’t mine and wasn’t of the world and was some kind of bad luck. I’d blinked and freaked. Made a loud sound. There was a sharp taste
of metal in my mouth.
Even the weather seemed to be coming apart. After I’d been at the center for about three weeks, there was a sudden thaw. The temperature, which had held steady in the twenties, rose suddenly through the thirties and forties. It stayed in the high forties for two days. Clear skies. The light looked more yellow than white. More butter than bone.
The next day the temperature rose right through the fifties and hit sixty-five, where it remained for the whole afternoon. A lot of snow melted, and in the middle of the large fields that surrounded the treatment center you could see the tallest of the brown grass blades poking through. People went outside to smoke without their coats. Tony—who may have been a murderer—even went outside without his shoes. The counselors looked worried, ready for anything. It was as if the day had come loose and dropped out of January, dropped out of the calendar.
The day it hit sixty-five, I sensed the weather before I woke. I slept very deeply now. My sleep was intricate, like a bookful of sentences written one over the other. The way to waking was slow. There were maybe three half or fake wakings before my eyes opened.
The morning of the thaw I first saw the new light on the false walls of a half waking. I emerged from sleep into a sunny castle room. The room was a kind of pre-waking, a dream extension, but I didn’t know that. I felt awake. I was going to meet someone. Her white face flashed back between the black lines of the wall of sleep. I’d been talking with her. Maybe something more. Her prints covered the missing parts of my body. We had an appointment. A meeting on the farthest outskirts of the castle, out where its halls and fountains faded and I could see the hazy outlines of the furniture in my bedroom in the treatment center.
I walked through the castle with long dream steps that hung in the air for several seconds. The secret of flight was in the length of those steps. New, real sunlight spotted my clothes and my arms. It pooled and glittered in my palms. The secret of flight was in it. My half-waking thoughts got tangled. I should hurry. Lieutenant Abelove was right. The way out was obvious. I opened my eyes. The rich light lay over my bed and the treatment center carpet. June light in January. It took me a while to see it was real and I was awake. I got out of bed and put on my clothes.
We ate breakfast in the light. A few hours later, the warm day clouded over. From obvious to secret. After group and before lunch I had a smoke with Peter.
“I just get so afraid,” I said, “that when I get out, well, and then, there’s also the—”
“Just relax,” Peter said. “Everything is going to be fine,” he said cheerfully.
The weird weather made the day go slow. At lunch there were silent minutes between bites. After lunch there was more time. Some people were counting things, days left, for example, or the number of plastic spoons in the drawers. Normally the staff—hypersensitive to boredom prevention—kept the schedule tight and stopped loose time from piling up. But that day we stood around with extra time coming out of our ears.
I got bored. Restless. Sitting around staring at the sky freaked me out, but sitting around bored, I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Marty and Al went to play pool in the rec center; I wanted to get some exercise in the open. I went outside and started walking, alone and without a coat, eyes rolling along the ground like dice. The air tasted like ashes. I walked until I couldn’t see the treatment center. A huge crow flapped slowly by, maybe six feet above the ground. It startled me. The low clouds were in its feathers, and it flew soundlessly.
I found a small cast-iron chair abandoned out in the center of a field. It must have been covered by snow until the thaw. Now its old-fashioned metal curlicues were bare and warm. I sat down in it. I looked out at the low, heavy, warm sky, the masses of trees at the lake’s edge, the wet edges of the lake ice.
I sat exposed there for a quarter hour, then walked back. My skin itched in the uncanny winter mugginess. My steps were slow to pull out of the wet snow. I felt like I’d forgotten something and walked back a little, then forgot and walked forward. The crow came back so I didn’t have to remember it.
When I got to the unit I opened the journal the treatment center had given each of us and I wrote down what was inside me. It took me a long time. I would write a little. Then I’d wait and think and wonder. And then I’d write a little more. Each line had two words on it, two secret words. This is what I wrote:
Iron Chair.
Crow. Heat.
Witches. Magic.
I read this today and wonder, why witches? Why magic? I don’t know for sure, but I have an idea.
The only way to recover from the memory disease is to forget yourself. You see, I was in a memory trap. In order to get out I had to forget myself. In order to forget about myself, I had to be sure there was something outside to grab on to. But the memory disease had trapped all of my senses. I couldn’t see outside. In order to get even a glimpse of what’s outside, I had to forget myself completely.
You see? It goes in circles, it’s impossible. How can I see what’s outside if I have to turn away from what’s inside to see it and I can’t let myself turn away from the inside until I can see what’s outside?
Witches. Magic. The little crackle of energy left around the chair and the crow came from the force with which the outside was thrown into me.
CHAPTER 15
Outside
On the plane home from the treatment center it happened again. I woke up from a nap next to a cloud. Blinking in a blue space that wasn’t inside me.
At the treatment center they’d talked a lot about a Higher Power who was supposed to suck me out of myself like a vacuum. But it looked to me like a pretty Low-Powered vacuum would do the trick. A nap, for instance. Maybe the point was not the Strength that broke me out of myself but the Weakness that kept me inside. Kept me barely. Who am I? A person can be cured of anything, I thought. I shivered.
When I got home, all everyone could say was how much better I looked. “Everyone” was my father, my mother, my stepmother, my sister, my brother, my half brother, my half sister, and Cash, who was living nearby. Well, my half sister didn’t tell me how good I looked. She was six months old and couldn’t really talk yet. My half brother Ryan was two. He took a little while to put his sense of my transformation into words.
“Ryan, don’t you have something to say to your big brother?”
“I got candy today.”
“Yes, but isn’t there something else?”
“B…b…baseball card.”
“Something about Michael?”
Silence. Loud whispers from Dad to Ryan.
“You look very better,” Ryan said. Everyone smiled at me. I smiled back.
I’d returned to a world of children. Soft food. Small words said slowly. It had been agreed that I would stay in my father’s basement until my legal problems had been sorted out and I got my bearings and could think about either writing my dissertation or getting a real job. I didn’t have to make any decisions right away. Although I hadn’t done any work in months, I was still on a dissertation fellowship. I was getting monthly checks, and didn’t need to make an appearance on campus for another half year. Which was fortunate, because I wasn’t supposed to leave the state.
I put my bags down in the small basement bedroom. The room was dense, with pink carpet, a couple hundred books in neat piles on the floor, and a small folding table holding my computer monitor and keyboard. A narrow crack under the door let in the ghost of children’s voices from upstairs. A high thin window above the bed let in the day’s ghost. It was there every day. At 5:00 p.m. I would watch it disappear on the far wall. It never woke me, but when I woke it was there. On overcast days it was less a presence than an absence. A rectangle lifted from the room’s heavy gray. Over the six months I stayed in Chicago, I grew to think of that rectangle of light as a single friendly ghost—awake each morning, asleep each night. Good morning, ghost!
When you live underground, the light that comes through the only window is significant.
Wh
en I went aboveground myself, it was almost too much. In those early days I was still drunk on the feeling of freedom from withdrawal on the one hand, and from narcotic coma on the other. The air was too strong; the light was too strong. I’ve always loved what is too strong for me, but I can’t take too much. For the first week I wore myself out with air and light and slept for twelve hours a day like a baby. After that I spent more time inside and underground. I spoke to no one but Cash and family, and mostly to the little kids.
Kids have always liked me, perhaps because I take a genuine interest in what interests them. I bet that dinosaur could kill that tank. What about an airplane? No, dinosaurs can’t kill airplanes. Maybe a helicopter. It was healthy for me to be around them. Spiritual. In their world, death was something that could happen to you many times. Like tanks or dinosaurs. You could die a thousand times every second. The kids had positive attitudes. They didn’t even smoke.
But sometimes seeing an unfocused stare in a child’s eye, or hearing a fascinated childish inhalation, disturbed the oldest memories I had, which turned and touched others, which had words attached to them, and words are the halo of the white thing. I had to go to my room. I turned off my light so I wouldn’t be disturbed and read self-help books by the light of the ghost’s face. Every day a new one.
I ate tuna-fish sandwiches every morning at Panera. I didn’t know about their high mercury content then, but I’m not sorry. I think mercury helps kill the memory disease. If I ever open a treatment center, it will serve tuna every day. On Tuesdays I would take Ryan to Chimpy’s. This was a rundown, kid-themed restaurant with a pen filled with colored plastic balls and little mechanical animals that the kids could ride on. If you put in a quarter, the metal animals vibrated a little, or rose three inches into the air, or played dead. There was an alligator, a giraffe, a tiger, and a horse. They were all covered in dyed fur. Even the alligator.
“You know alligators don’t have fur, Ryan,” I told him. As an educated person, I felt responsible.
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