Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  You want to leave, you can leave. You just sign a piece of paper that says you relieve the hospital of responsibility, and you leave, watching so the door don’t bang your butt on the way out. Don’t worry about it, Earl. You think I’m worried about it? Look in my eyes. You see even the tiniest bit of anxiety? No. If Mr. Hinkle wants to do more research, more power to him. Let him see if it’s any better out there.”

  It might have been Jack’s imagination, his paranoia, but he thought Blanche shot him a meaningful look.

  That night, Jack read The Clears flyer. He’d forgotten to read it the previous evening, distracted by Kerry’s notebook, but now, when he emptied his pockets, he found the folded yellow paper, picked it up, unfolded it, and smoothed it on his knee. Having just watched Hinkle board The Clear’s van—a fact he had not passed on to Blanche or anyone else (because, he reasoned, it was none of his business)—he felt a more personal interest in the document.

  YOU ARE IN HELL it shouted, in bold black type spanning the top of the page. Hell’s denizens, in the form of pen-and-ink sketches of winged serpents and fire-breathing gargoyles, decorated the edges of the paper. The drawings had a Victorian flavor, were, perhaps, clip art from some Victorian grotesque collection.

  Underneath this stark pronouncement were three columns of text that accounted for two thirds of the flyer’s space, the last third being occupied by an order form and a square photo of a man’s face. The man was wearing sunglasses and grinning. A caption identified him as Dorian Greenway. The photo was fuzzy, the halftone screen rough; it could have been anyone.

  Jack read:

  If you are an alcoholic, you know what it means to live in Hell. Perhaps you’ve gone to Alcoholics Anonymous for help. They have explained to you that you have a disease, a physical, emotional and spiritual disease. The disease cannot be cured, although it can be arrested. By not taking the first drink, you can be free of all the dire consequences of your drinking; you can lead a productive life. However, if you drink alcohol after years of abstinence, your compulsion will reassert itself, you will again be swept up by your addiction.

  Alcoholics Anonymous is a deluded organization of self-righteous fools. Their misguided and arrogant teachings have destroyed many.

  Their basic tenet is flawed. It is not a disease that you have; it is a damnation.

  You are the progeny of an ancient Tribe, known by many names, but called, most commonly, K’n-Yan. The K’n-Yan were an underground race who worshipped Tsathoggua until that monstrous god’s true nature was revealed, at which time the Great Rift occurred. The K’n-Yan were hurled into an asynchronous reality, perversely focused by alcohol and drugs. Hungers were created in this vortex. The hunger for love, for prestige, for money-and the hunger most manifest, the hunger for alcohol and drugs, which granted the accursed a spurious, fleeting clarity.

  Have you ever snapped out of sleep in a cold sweat, pitched into the DTs, seen some hideous thing, a nightmare serpent or some unearthly creature?

  This is no mental derangement. This is no hallucination, no product of out-of-balance electrolytes. What if I were to tell you, There is such a place, and the monsters live there.

  Science denies this, of course. But I tell you, you must see these monsters in the clearest light if you are to conquer them.

  I cannot tell you how the curse is passed down through the generations. It is not simply of the blood. The K’n-Yan, a telepathic race, transmitted it psychically, I’m convinced, so that it transcended all racial boundaries. Almost all Native Americans (living in close proximity to the largest K’n-Yan population) seem to have suffered its effects.

  It is truly a war that is being waged. You must prepare yourself for a battle, soldiers of Shub-Niggurath, Yig, Ghatanothoa. The Unraveling is at hand. You will battle ancient and terrible forces as a soldier in the army of The Clear. And you will free yourself forever from the bondage of drug and alcohol addiction.

  In my book, Alcoholism and the Pnakotic Pentagon, I clarify what cannot be addressed on this single page. That book can be obtained from many local bookstores or purchased by mail using the printed order form below.

  You already know, intuitively, what you are. Many of you have united in the fellowship of AA, and this coming together is instinctive-and futile.

  We of The Clear number less than a hundred. But we are growing, our best advertisement being the truth. Come with us.

  Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, was riven by a wind that showed him the way. He was a pawn to dark forces, although the wind and the torment and the circle of denial are all real.

  We are still inside the cave, my children. The Clear is the pathway to the true light, to the surface, to freedom.

  For more infor...

  Jack didn’t feel the need for additional enlightenment. He saw, however, why AA members might not take kindly to Dorian Greenway’s proselytizing. Hell

  Someone was always hawking some version of Hell, Jack thought. Sometimes Jack had a clear picture of Hell’s origin. Some poor caveman prods his dead companion with a stick, thinks, “Hum. Thrug no move. Smell bad. Fod.” And then the lightning cracks and thunder rolls and the caveman thinks, “Me be dead sometime too. Double fod.”

  And so, coaxing hope out of mystery, the caveman turns to a living companion and says, “I think maybe our spirit go somewhere else, some happy place and live forever when we be dead.” And this second caveman says, “Maybe so—and if you not live right here, do something make the gods angry, then you go to horrible place forever, hurt every day, cry and holler and wish you could wake up but—ha, ha—you not asleep. You miserable forever.”

  Any good idea, any piece of small comfort, is quickly spoiled by the next sour human in line. That’s the nature of things. Any fish, as Sara was wont to say, can have bones.

  The next morning, after breakfast, the scheduled alcoholism video (The Morning After) was canceled. Parks herded everyone into the dayroom for a special meeting.

  Jack figured they were in for a lecture prompted by Hinkle’s dereliction, but Parks wasn’t thinking of the truck driver.

  “I have good news,” he said. “Good news for me, and, I think, good news for you. I will no longer be working at Hurley Memorial.” He grinned, rocked on the balls of his feet, stood on tiptoe and stretched a bit as though drawn toward the ceiling by a new lightness of spirit. He sank back down, faked a rueful expression, and said, “I know, you are thinking, ‘How can it be good news that our beloved counselor, the one person we rely on for guidance, is leaving us?’” He scratched his goatee, frowned with mock thoughtfulness (in the fashion of a skilled mime or apprentice dinner theater actor). “Hmmmmm. Good question.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled.

  “And here’s the good news: You’re all coming with me!”

  Wesley Parks had been hired to work at a treatment center called New Way, which was six years old and in need of a counselor to replace one who had quit abruptly. The rehab was county run, and while some of its patients were paying customers, the majority were broke and uninsured.

  For years, a few patients would go directly from Hurley to New Way, which was located on twenty acres of land in the small town of Harken (ten miles west of Leesburg, Virginia).

  Most patients, however, refused the offer of free treatment at Harken. Being urban folks (from Washington, D.C. and its teeming environs), they were not eager to travel to primitive outlands for the cure. To these people, the word country conjured visions of snakes, centipedes, spiders, outhouses, and grueling, unsavory chores (hog butchering, cow milking, fence mending). The country was that place where the weather was always bad, shelter was primitive, and even the airwaves suffered, radios being devoid of anything but evangelists, farm reports, and banjo music.

  Gates was the first to object. “Ah ain’t going to no farm!” Gates said, pronouncing it fahm (as though it were a foreign word, something loathsome and untranslatable). “Fahms ain’t never done right by my people. Next thing you know, I be sett in
in some tar-paper shack, my fingers all tore up on cotton.”

  The other members were equally unenthusiastic. Only Eunice (the fat woman whose children had dumped her in Hurley) and Ed Tilman immediately agreed to go. Eunice acquiesced in the spirit of martyrdom (abandoned by her children, she would go into the wilderness and suffer), and Tilman thought it would be a good place to “lie low.”

  Parks shook his head sadly, disappointed by his recalcitrant clients. “This is a great opportunity to get your feet planted firmly on recovery’s path,” Parks said. “Free. Fairfax County is footing the bill. There are people who will be paying $20,000 for the sort of treatment program that New Way is offering you.”

  “I’d just as soon have the money,” Gates said, which caused young Al to double over with laughter, shoulders shaking as he leaned forward on the sofa, sneakered feet slapping the linoleum floor.

  Parks smiled. “I hope you retain your sense of humor in prison, AL Laughter is a great comfort in hard times.”

  Al stopped laughing and went still. He looked up at the counselor. “Hey now. You saying its this place or jail? That’s not right. This is America; I got freedoms guaranteed me.”

  Parks smiled and nodded. “Of course you do. And New Way is not affiliated with the courts. No one can make you go there. But you might want to talk to your lawyer about all this. A judge could look at your driving record and doubt your resolve to turn over a new leaf. He could see all those DWIs and think, This fellow has threatened the lives of law-abiding motorists once too often.’ Now if such a judge discovered that you had turned down an opportunity for free alcoholism treatment...” Parks shrugged. “Ask your lawyer how things might go if the judge feels you aren’t interested in cleaning up your act.”

  Al sat with his mouth half open, dazed, as though his chewing gum had turned to stone.

  Parks continued: “You all have three days to think about what you want to do. I’d like everyone to come. But I can’t make you. The decision is yours. Kerry, I’d like to see you in my office after lunch.”

  “I’m going to New Way,” Kerry told Jack that evening. “Can you believe it?”

  Jack looked up from the magazine article he had been reading. The article was entitled “Mapping Your Emotions,” and someone had already filled out the questionnaire that accompanied the text, using a red pen and pausing occasionally to draw little stick figures and lightning bolts. The test-taker had scored twenty-two. The recipient of such a dismal score was urged to seek immediate professional help.

  “Well,” Jack said.

  Kerry giggled. “Yeah. Wesley got Jason to agree he won’t press charges if I go to New Way.”

  “Jason?”

  “I didn’t really steal his car. I just drove it out of the parking lot and into a tree. That was my entire intention. I don’t like his car, don’t want it. It’s one of those racy old Camaro things with the back hiked way up. You know how a cat in heat will wave her butt in the air? That’s what comes to mind, and I told Jason that, but he just loved that car, and I probably shouldn’t have—”

  “Who’s Jason?”

  “Jason is this guy who thinks he is God’s gift to women. Which he definitely is not. Can you believe it, he thought oral sex meant talking dirty.”

  The AA meeting that night was held in the hospital. It was an older crowd that came. The leader of the meeting was a self-satisfied ancient wearing a plaid sports jacket. He said, “Most of you folks will drink again. You will walk out these doors thinking you got it licked, and you won’t attend any AA meetings, and the next thing you know liquor will knock you on your ass.”

  Gates jumped up in the back row. “What’s wrong with you man?” he shouted. “Mr. Bill Wilson be ashamed of a message like that. I wouldn’t carry a message like that across the street! Goddam. We a bunch of sick muthers laid up in a hospital, all low and poorly, shakin, seeing things, and you come bustin in saying we got worse ahead. Mr. Doctor Bob would carve your lights out, he hear such low-down talk calling itself a message. Shit.” Gates plopped backdown, arms folded in front of him, a fierce scowl stamped on his features.

  Somebody applauded. The leader, flustered, quickly called on one of his cronies who said that Arnie was just sharing his experience and that it was a sad truth that many people left detox and returned to drinking.

  The whole meeting was, Jack felt, contentious, the forces of hope and optimism allied against those who felt the reality of alcoholism required a no-nonsense cautionary delivery.

  After the meeting, a large, hearty man in a suit came up to Jack, hugged him, and said, “Hang in there. I love you.” Jack smiled wanly and said nothing, embarrassed. He had never met the man and this declaration of love felt presumptuous. Unconditional-love harassment, Jack thought. As pernicious in its way as sexual harassment—more so, perhaps, since no one sympathized with the victim, no legal recourse was at hand.

  Depressed, Jack went back to his room and lay on his bed. He desperately wanted a drink. A beer would do. Holding a cold beer can in his hand would almost be enough, the silky metal against his palm, the heft of a promise that would be kept. It would quiet him instantly. Of course, drinking would set him to thinking of Sara, and he could travel so far into that black cave that there would be no getting back.

  Too jittery to think, he drifted back into the hall.

  At the nurse’s station, Blanche was speaking on the phone.

  Jack heard the tail end of the conversation. When Blanche hung up and turned toward him, he said, “Is Hinkle back?”

  Blanche narrowed her eyes. He could see her first impulse was to say, None of your business, but then she changed her mind.

  She nodded. “He’s down in the ER. You’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

  “Did he drink again?”

  Blanche faked broad amazement, eyes wide. “Now why would you think a thing like that?”

  The day came. The sky was overcast, moody weather. For late October it was unseasonably cold, and there were small, damp pockets of even colder air, unhappy autumn ghosts. One such ghost had stepped in front of Jack as he was walking toward the van, and the encounter had left Jack clumsy with a kind of unfocused grief, grief for some future tragedy, remorse as yet unborn.

  Jack found a seat on the van and Gates immediately sat down next to him. “Ah can’t believe I’m going to some fahm,” Gates said. “Ah can’t believe it.”

  Gates was going because he had argued with his son-in-law, Marvin. The exact nature of the argument was unclear, but Gates had pushed tall, lanky Marvin backwards, toppled him over a sofa in the dayroom, and the young man had leapt to his feet and called his father-in-law a “sorry-assed smoke head” and Gates’s lovely daughter, Leeda, had come between them, preventing the argument from escalating to blows.

  Leeda and her husband had come with the intention of taking her father back to their apartment in D.C., but the altercation killed that plan. Gates refused to budge. “You’ll see me percolatin in Hell first,” he grumbled.

  Now, hunched in his seat, he kept saying, “Ah can’t believe it. On my way to a goddam fahm.”

  Jack was fighting his own battle with credulity. Yesterday morning, he would have laughed at—and did—any suggestion that he should sacrifice six weeks of his life to intensive group therapy and alcoholism education.

  Then, last night, he’d had a change of heart. In the morning, he’d sought Parks out.

  Parks had looked up from the notepad he’d been writing on. He looked very young, skinny and harried, his tie undone, his hair sticking out in two flared wings above his ears, his goatee bristling. His smile was manic, fierce. “Well, Professor. How’s the old head? I guess you’ve learned not to get between an alcoholic and his booze.” Parks chuckled. “Guess we’ll both be glad to get out of here. Sorry you don’t want to come, but—”

  Jack interrupted, explained that, in fact, he had changed his mind and would like to come.

  Parks narrowed his eyes, said nothing. Then he nodded
his head. “Last night changed your mind? Hinkle got you to thinking, did he?”

  Jack nodded. “I guess.”

  Parks grinned, nodding his head violently now. “Sometimes you’ve got to hit an alcoholic over the head to get his attention.”

  Jack grinned back. He didn’t trust himself to speak. But he knew that this alcoholism counselor was right on one count: Last night had been an attention getter.

  “Ah ain’t milkin no cow, feedin no chickens,” Gates was saying.

  Jack thought of Wesley Parks and the notebook Parks had been writing on. The white page had been covered with little red stick figures and lightning bolts, the same distinctive doodles that had adorned the article entitled “Mapping Your Emotions.”

  According to that test, Jack’s alcoholism counselor had the emotional resources of a mollusk.

  “And ah ain’t cuttin no hogs,” Gates was saying.

  Jack wondered if he was doing the right thing. But last night had unnerved him, had left him with a strong desire for remote therapeutic havens.

  The AA meeting that night had been another in-hospital meeting, and Kerry had leaned over and whispered in Jack’s ear, “Look.”

  He’d already seen them, seated in the back of the room near the water fountain, three young men in white shirts, a clump of silent otherness.

  A man named Mort (who wore a black jumpsuit and a black woolen cap suggestive of risky, covert activities) spoke. Mort talked about humility, pontificating at length. He was remarkably boring (a quality that, Jack noted, often accompanied outrageous, declamatory fashion statements), explaining that there were three sorts of humility. He said that he would explain each in detail.

  Jack thought the lecture was drawing to a close when the first two types of humility had finally been delineated, but then the final variety came under examination. “This kind of humility can be divided into four parts,” the man said, and Jack lost all hope, setting his mind free to roam elsewhere. He thought of a time when he was eleven years old and a neighborhood dog named Pudgy would bite him every morning. He remembered how everyone gave him advice on how to avoid this (just as people will suggest various hiccup cures). Befriend him. Pudgy would bite. Run at him. Pudgy would bite. Ignore him. Pudgy would bite. Most of the kids agreed that Pudgy’s biting was probably the result of some flaw in Jack’s character.