Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Gates had been talking about his thirst for whiskey. “It just swoops me up,” he said. “Makes me all dizzy and distracted.”

  He’d got them started, all of them eloquent on this subject. Eunice had talked about how Jesus Himself couldn’t wrestle that vanilla extract from her (drunk, she would smell like a cake), and Al said he even drank the sweet, licorice-tasting stuff that his parents kept in the cupboard, knowing it would make him sick but hungering after the buzz.

  Martin Pendleton, who had taken to attending group every day, nodded sadly and said, “Drinking’s like hugging your own pain, nothing but hurting and wanting, hurting and wanting, wanting...” He drifted into a mutter. His beating at the hands of The Clear had left no permanent physical damage, but it had wrought some deep psychic change; he was gloomy and fierce. “They meant to kill me,” he told Jack and Ed. “I thought I was on my way to Saint Peter, but here I am. Reckon the Good Lord don’t want me yet. Reckon I’m still responsible, gotta keep hauling the sorry-assed, suffering alcoholic to meetings, gotta keep shouting the message even if it falls on a deaf ear.”

  “How do you live with nothing but yearning?” Jack asked, and blank stares were all the answer he got. Still, he felt that the question was critical to his survival. If he could find an answer to that question, perhaps he could live with his alcoholism. This reaching out and being rebuffed (losing love, losing hope) was the oldest joke, and if it was God’s joke, then God was evil, no way around it. But “God is evil” was not the answer either, merely semantics.

  Kerry knew all about it, her teenage cynicism dead on. You might as well get that desire chip, it was all you could ever claim: Desire. The medallion in his fist tingled, a phenomenon he did not care to examine (subconscious machinations, no doubt) but which was, this trembling life, both a painful echo of loss and a desperate last-ditch connection that he could not relinquish.

  “Well, Professor, let’s not get too philosophical,” Parks said. “Let’s just stick with the program, one day at a time, easy does it, et cetera.” Parks was a jittery group leader these days, various facial tics working overtime, his head bobbing like a sycophant among VIPs.

  Jack had expected Parks to be relieved by the disappearance of The Clear—and they were gone, vanished. The mansion had burned to the ground, the white buildings still stood, and The Clear were definitely gone.

  On hearing the news, Wesley Parks had fainted. Revived, he was greatly agitated, a condition which could have indicated genuine concern (the bell tolls for us all), except that Jack was certain Wesley Parks was not moved by compassion or empathy. Something else was operating here.

  Gates said, “Whiskey can take up all your thoughts, don’t leave no room for nothin,” and everyone nodded. They were a dark-hearted, rueful lot in the absence of Kerry. Al now maintained that he had loved her. He would sob himself red-eyed in group, hyperventilate, clutch whomever was handy and moan dismally. Jack wanted to throttle the lugubrious teen, despising these histrionics. The authenticity of Al’s grief over Kerry’s disappearance was, Jack felt, compromised by Al’s inclination to get her name wrong, often referring to her as Lisa.

  Jack realized that he was not particularly fond of any of these people. Nor was he much drawn to the people he met in Harken’s AA meetings. A large part of AA’s strength was this bond of shared suffering, but Jack felt himself drifting away from his fellows, alienated by despair.

  Martin had taken them to more AA meetings, two a day, convinced that total immersion was the ticket, but even in AA meetings, seeds of discontent could be sewn. Last night they had gone to a meeting where Bitter Bob (not to be confused with Wanker Bob, an Englishman who, when drunk, was inclined to expose himself) had shared at length. “Every year gets a little worse,” Bitter Bob said. He was originally from New York (where he got sober), a fat man with small black eyes that were grim prisoners in his flesh. He had many chins, which shook when he was overwrought (his normal condition). He had been sober for twelve years. He talked for fifteen unhappy minutes, concluding with, “I lost my job. I got high blood pressure. My ex-wives took every dime I ever made. I think this program’s a sham. I’d kill myself if I had the energy.”

  People who heard Bitter Bob for the first time would go to him, offering consolation. He would look surprised, even offended by their solicitude. “Huh? I’m fine,” he would say. “This is the way we do it in New York. We just let it all out and then go on with our lives.”

  The meeting Bitter Bob spoke at was a low-bottom club called Round the Clock in a bad part of town near the bus station. “Low bottom” was an AA description applied to alcoholics who had lost everything or experienced particularly unpleasant and degrading circumstances in the process of hitting bottom. Homelessness, hallucinations, prison, mental wards, hospitals... these were all part of the low-bottom resume. In AA, the more dreadful your drinking past, the more venerated you were in recovery.

  Sometimes this got out of hand, became (an apt metaphor) a pissing contest. “I was way worse than you!” someone might holler. “I’d have been thro wed out of Hell for being rowdy!”

  It saddened Jack, this jostling for position, but the high-bottom meetings were worse, with men in suits agonizing over stock options while their women fretted over vacation plans and incompetent interior decorators. In one such meeting, Jack had found himself feeling the pain of a woman who had, that day, been betrayed and scorned. She was sobbing, heartbroken. Jack’s own heart ached in empathy. Then she revealed the source of her grief, a canceled appointment at her hair salon. After that, Jack was wary about letting his sympathy loose in the presence of vague emotional strife. Let’s have some details, he would think. Are we talking chemotherapy or travel plans gone awry ?

  But, in truth, Jack knew there was nothing wrong with the AA meetings. His irritation with others was simply a manifestation of his own relentless self-loathing.

  He was not only sick of himself, he was sick of being sick of himself, sick, in other words, of the whole echoing mirrorhall of his morbid reflection. He knew all his tricks; and despised them all.

  He was certain he was going to drink again. So far, he had resisted the temptation to leave New Way. But he could get away any time he wanted to; no one would stop him. He could hike down the road. At the first gas station, he could call a cab. He could find a bar, hunker down at the end of it. Better yet, he could buy a bottle, find a motel somewhere, sort it all out.

  Now people were standing up, milling around. Group was over.

  Jack found himself staring at the one member who remained seated. Ed Tilman sat in his folding chair, head lowered so that the pink bald spot on the top of his head gleamed under the fluorescent lights.

  Ed was wearing a long-sleeve, blue workshirt. He was rubbing his right forearm vigorously and frowning. He looked up, saw Jack, and stopped. He got up abruptly and left the room.

  Ed didn’t want to let Jack in when Jack knocked on his door.

  “Something’s wrong,” Jack said. “I can tell.”

  “I’m fine,” Tilman said, peering from behind his door.

  “Something’s wrong with your arm.”

  Tilman opened the door wider then, letting Jack in. He closed the door behind Jack. “Yeah, something’s wrong. I was thinking maybe if I didn’t talk about it, it would go away. Like a little old lady, I was thinking that.” He sat on the bed, shaking his head. Then he looked up, staring straight at Jack, letting Jack have a good look at his eyes and the naked fear there. “I’m scared, is all, flat scared.”

  “What is it??”

  “Two days ago, I was washing the dishes. I don’t mind taking my turn washing dishes, but I had to tell Aaron I was sick, had to get out of there, because the minute I stuck my arms in that water, well, I felt water in my lungs, in my throat, felt like I’d gone under myself, drowning in a big, gray vat of soapsuds. I could see huge silver objects and two white gleaming disks. As soon as I snatched my arms out of that dishwater, I could see the kitchen again.
I told Aaron I was feeling poorly, and I staggered off to bed and lay there, tasting hot soap on my tongue, replaying every detail of my drowning fit. It came to me then. I knew what the silver objects were, knew what those big white disks were too. I’d been bug-sized, under water in the sink, blinking at submerged pots and pans and porcelain dishes that seemed as big as houses.

  “I thought about all this some more, and I decided it had something to do with the itching in my forearm. I guess I knew where that came from and just hadn’t wanted to think about it either. That big old nurse that attacked me... I thought the needle she stuck me with had broken off before I got a dose... I guess I was spared most of it. But I got some of whatever she was promoting. I got a lick of the devil.” He sighed, began rolling up his sleeve. “Might as well show you.”

  Jack blinked at a shimmering silver patch the size of a fifty-cent piece. It lay, like spilled mercury, on top of the old man’s forearm, about midway between wrist and elbow.

  Peering closer, Jack saw, with that queasy empathy that makes one dizzy at the sight of another’s blood, that this silver, roughly circular shape seemed to writhe, its boundaries trembling, shifting.

  “Want to see a trick?” Tilman said. Jack didn’t think, actually, that he did, but the question was rhetorical. Tilman picked a pencil up from the nightstand and pushed it into the silver, winking radiance. The pencil, shoved point first, disappeared into what was revealed to be a glittering hole. Tilman continued to push the pencil down until he was holding it by the eraser. “Doesn’t hurt,” he said, shooting his eyes toward Jack. “And you’ll notice it hasn’t popped out the other side of my arm either.” Tilman, still holding the pencil by its eraser, turned his arm slowly in a time-honored magician’s gesture (nothing up this sleeve). “Now how do you explain that?”

  Jack stared, silent, the recipient of another rhetorical question.

  Tilman pulled the pencil back. It seemed to shimmer briefly in a blue-white nimbus before turning dull, returned to the mundane world.

  “It wasn’t there that night I was washing dishes and had my fit. It wasn’t there so I could see it anyway. It was staring at me the next morning though. And one thing you don’t want to do,” Tilman said. “If you acquire one of these silver holes in your flesh, don’t be sticking your finger in it. You’ll feel sort of inside-out if you do. I can’t describe it, but it’s not a sensation you would seek out, trust me.”

  “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”

  Tilman smiled wanly. “I sent that photo of Greenway, the one that set Kerry off, to a friend of mine. We go back a long way. He called yesterday.

  He’s still puzzling over it. Says that the green dust on that photo is some kind of amphetamine mixed with aspirin. Yeah, aspirin. And that’s it. His initial conclusion was that the powder just served as some sort of posthypnotic cue, didn’t, all by itself, get our girl’s mind in a brand-new place. That was going to be the extent of his report, but then he decided to look a little closer. I couldn’t follow all of what he had to say. He’s not an excitable fellow, but this had him in a turmoil. The photographic paper itself is altered, he says, on a molecular level in a way that is making a lie out of some cherished subatomic truths.” Tilman shrugged. “That news don’t do anything for me, either, but what it makes me think, about consulting doctors, is that that might be a waste of time. I want to consult with Dorian Greenway himself. I want to consult with my hands around his throat.”

  “How are we going to find him?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it? That question is ninety-nine percent of your grade.” Tilman was squinting at the brightness on his arm, a tiny sun-flared lake or one of those boiling brain lights that float into your vision prior to a massive migraine.

  Tilman sighed. “I think this son of a bitch is growing.”

  That night, in the dining room, Wesley Parks got in another argument with his dessert. It was a banana pudding that he took umbrage with this time. “Fuck you!” he screamed.

  He had triumphed over the jello, and was, perhaps, overly confident. He lifted the bowl, prepared to hurl it against a wall, slipped and fell backwards, banging his head against the coffee cart. A glass pot fell, smashed, and splashed hot coffee on him, spraying his neck and face. He howled, jumped up, and fled the room.

  The pudding had, miraculously, landed upright and unscathed except for a small portion of itself that had abandoned the bowl for the floor.

  Aaron came out from the kitchen, hurried over to the pudding, and lifted it in both hands as though it were an injured puppy. The cook shook his head, glared at the door through which Parks had made his exit. Then he sighed audibly, stood up and went back into the kitchen, the pudding cradled close to his stomach, shoulders hunched protectively against some new assault.

  “Our counselor is crazy,” Jack said.

  “Hell, you know what kind of crazy, too,” Gates said. “Crazy drunk!”

  Jack turned to Gates. “Drunk?”

  “Sure. What you think? Guess I’m the only one with eyes in my head. I been watchin and watchin that muther. I ain’t talkin whiskey drunk. I would have smelled that. I’m talkin pill drunk.”

  “What—”

  Gates was nodding his head grimly. “I been follerin him, doggin his slippery old self. I seen some stuff. You know why he was all tore up when he heard that those Clear muthers was burned down and run out?”

  “Well...”

  Gates was still nodding his head. “You know why he ain’t still tore up?”

  Jack stared at Gates.

  Gates smiled broadly. “The muther thought he lost his connection, then he found out he didn’t. They still coming round. They still slippin him the stuff; he still getting fried. I been watchin.”

  “Are you saying that members of The Clear have been—are still— supplying Wesley Parks with drugs? Why didn’t you say something earlier?” (Jack experienced a wince of awareness here; Kerry had asked him the same question.)

  Gates frowned. “Where you been, Mr. Professor? You think somebody’s gonna give this black man a prize for damn investigative reportin? Damn. I’m just watchin out for my own self. I’m telling you cause it might be you could profit from the information.”

  Back in his room after dinner, Jack thought about what Gates had said, about profiting from the information. Life was lived in a sea of uncertainty, of misapprehension, of impulse. When did you ever have enough information—even to take that first faltering step on life’s journey?

  Jack didn’t know what he should do. If Gates was right, if Wesley Parks was on drugs—scored from The Clear—Martin Pendleton needed to know about it. Jack had assumed that Wesley was simply crazy. If you started firing alcoholism counselors just because they were crazy, a fearsome winnowing would occur throughout the field. No, you had to tolerate some nonlinear behavior or you wouldn’t have any troops at all. But an alcoholism counselor who was doing drugs... that wouldn’t work.

  Jack sighed. He’d never been good at decisions; he still wasn’t. He decided to think about it tomorrow.

  In the meantime, he settled down to work on his Fourth Step. Martin had said, “No meeting tonight; I want you all to work on your Fourth Steps. Recovery isn’t just meetings; we got a program too.”

  Jack’s attempt to write about God had been less than successful. He decided he would tackle the problem of yearning. Group had been no help. Perhaps a written analysis would clarify his question.

  YEARNING he wrote at the top of his legal pad. This was still, he supposed, a God-resentment, since it was God who had buried desire and aspiration so deep in the human heart.

  Jack wrote quickly once he got going, losing himself in his thoughts.

  He seemed to have lived his life out in the cold, full of hunger, with his face pressed up against the glass. He wanted everything. If he were to kill himself tomorrow, he would, no doubt, be reincarnated as one of those angry blue flies, caught mysteriously between screen and windowpane, capable only of bu
zzing with heated frustration, the rattling of a lost and hopeless soul driven mad by unrequited desires.

  Acceptance was the key, of course, but if acceptance was learning to live in the cold and hunger, then suicide seemed the ultimate acceptance, the acknowledgment that life would never grow less implacable.

  Bitter Bob’s words came to Jack: “I think this program’s a sham.” Life seemed fraudulent, sometimes.

  Jack wondered if he didn’t ask too much of life. Was he disillusioned because he had constructed willful illusions? The dream of being a college professor (a dream which had driven him to work very hard, to study and strive passionately) had not matched the reality of indifferent students, mindless administrative details, pompous faculty members, and fashionable, thought-free curriculums. The dream of Sara’s love had remained a dream, and so it continued to burn without flickering. But was that because it remained unresolved, an immaculate, impossible ghost? And Kerry? Was she a detox infatuation (a clinically predictable phenomenon) that he could now enshrine?

  It was not fair that life held so many things that could assail your heart and senses in an instant.

  Jack made a list:

  Sunlight on water and plunging in, shattering summer, the smell of chlorine

  Sara’s eyebrows, her jasmine perfume, her sly interrogations

  Snow filling a windowpane, a fire in the fireplace and the radio’s pretense of crisis when none in fact exists, when all is warm and safe

  Van Gogh’s brush strokes

  Entering the promise of the dark bar where the waitress knows you and fetches the amber-brown bottle and opens it and a pale serpent of mist lolls out and the beer waterfalls, foaming into the frosted mug (frost you can scratch with a fingernail) and—

  Jack tore the page from the pad and crumpled it. The intent of this exercise was not, he was fairly certain, self-torture. Once again, he’d taken a turn into hostile territory.