Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Monk couldn’t be sure about that, because sometimes he thought that a woman’s missing fingers had always been missing, a man’s leg always curiously truncated. But, other times, it struck him as strange, and he couldn’t get past the strangeness.

  Monk was not an articulate young man, and when Martin asked for more detail regarding The Clear’s doctrine, Monk couldn’t supply it. Since Dorian Greenway routinely changed his crack-brained theories, Monk could be forgiven his confusion. He did say something that reminded Jack of what he had read in The Clear’s proselytizing flyer (a document read mere weeks ago and not, as it seemed, in a long dead past). Monk said, “We addicts and alcoholics, we are a tribe, Dorian says, a tribe with some fancy name, and we been cursed with a condition of unlove.” Monk nodded, offering himself encouragement to continue. “Unlove. Means we got a hole that can’t be filled, and it can’t be filled with drugs and alcohol and money and sex no matter how hard we try. Want to know why it can’t be filled?”

  Martin did not seem on the edge of his chair, but he nodded grimly. “Cause the hole ain’t really in this world, it’s in another world. It’s got to be patched there, we got to go in there and patch it.” Monk was nodding rapidly now, looking scared, as though aware that his listeners were way back in the dust of disbelief, looking around, hoping to catch some more credible ride.

  “Did this condition ever manifest itself in the people around you?” The voice made Jack turn. Tilman had left his seat on the sofa and was standing in the middle of the room. He was agitated, the flesh of his face almost as white as his mustache.

  “I don’t—” Monk began.

  “You ever see anything like this?” Ed Tilman yanked the black glove from his right hand, unbuttoned the cuff of his shirt sleeve, rolled the shirt up his forearm and extended his hand, palm down, arm stretched parallel to the floor. Shimmering silver holes rolled lazily up and down his arm, like jellyfish made of mercury. His fingers glittered when he moved them, the shape of his hand shifting. The air surrounding his arm seemed imbued with a new, liquid translucence.

  Eunice said, “Oh dear.” The others stared in silence.

  Finally, grimly, Monk said, “I seen it before.”

  “And what,” Tilman said, “was the final fate of those so afflicted?”

  “I couldn’t say. Not in just every case.”

  “They melted away, didn’t they? Just sort of filled up with holes until there was more hole than human, right?”

  “I never saw it,” Monk said, swallowing hard. He tried to keep his eyes from Tilman’s silver arm, but he couldn’t. “I guess that’s what I heard.”

  “Is there a cure?” Tilman asked. “Did you ever hear of anyone being cured?”

  Everyone waited for the boy’s reply. He gave it some thought, frowning. “Well, we were told that we were doing it to ourselves, that it was an inside job, that’s how Dorian put it.” Monk sighed. “But I don’t know as that helped anyone. They just kept thinking they were sick, and...” Monk was rubbing the palms of his hands on his knees, unhappy with the bad news it was his to impart. He didn’t say anything else.

  Ed Tilman shook his head, rolled his sleeve back down, carefully worked the glove back onto his hand, said, “Well,” and turned and left the room.

  Soon after Ed left the room, the meeting broke up. Martin wanted to make some phone calls and so canceled group. He told Monk that he could stay if he was willing to go to AA meetings. Monk readily agreed, and Al said he’d show him around. They went off together, Al saying, as they walked out of the room, “I ain’t hardly an alcoholic, I’m just here on the advice of my lawyer.”

  Hubert said he had to get back, check up on his manservant, McPhee, who was suicidal lately and needed close watching. Hubert and Eunice hugged warmly and at length before his departing, which caused Gates to frown and, turning to Jack, say, “That’s called thirteenth steppin. You got the twelve steps and then you got what Mr. Bill W. called the thirteenth step which is the hanky-panky step. Some folks don’t care for it, say it will send you to drinking in a wink, but I say it’s natural, birds getting on with those bees.” Gates shook his head. “Course, thirteenth steppin could kill an old geezer like that Hubert feller. That’s his look-out, though, and if you gotta pitch off the deep end sometime, that might be the best way to go.” At lunch, New Way’s secretary, Gretchen Payne, sat across from Jack and said, out of nowhere, “I’m in love with Martin, and I’ve a mind to tell him. What do you think?”

  There are days when a theme is in your face, written on every event, and this, apparently, was such a day. Jack told Gretchen that he was not an authority on love, not someone who should be giving advice on the subject. “Probably honesty is the best policy,” he said.

  “What if I tell him and he is disgusted?” she asked.

  “You could say that you were kidding and laugh wildly,” Jack said. Gretchen frowned. “You’re right. You’re not too great with advice. Where’d you ever get advice like that?”

  Jack shrugged, saying nothing, although he could have said that this advice was based on his own experience. In the second grade, he had declared his love for a small, blond girl and her response had been to stick her tongue out, and he had told her that it was a joke and laughed wildly and unconvincingly, and she had said, inscrutably, her brown eyes bright as a ferret’s, “Laugh if you must, from dawn till dust,” (perhaps something learned from her mother) and she had run away, Jack’s heart bouncing after her like a can kicked into a quarry.

  Remembering, Jack had felt suddenly exhausted. He excused himself, went back to his room and lay down, rallying briefly for mail call and then returning to his bed where he studied another postcard from his mother. The photo was of some European village, the houses scrubbed white, a blue sky with a sensible serving of clouds, a man in a suit, riding a bicycle, shoulders back, stiff with dignity as though aware of the camera preparing to glue him to historical time. Her mother’s scrawled words were few: “Dear Jack—Drat! Had hoped to meet you in D.C. for Thanksgiving—your choice of restaurants—but schedule’s in shambles, expect I won’t see the New World until Jan. Hope you are well and thriving. Love, Ellen.”

  Thanksgiving? Was that coming up? November, right? Was time flying or dragging?

  Dante had, in the middle of his life, found himself lost in a dark wood, not knowing how he got there. Jack wondered if Dante had been a drinking man.

  They went, that night, to an AA meeting in Leesburg. Martin said he needed a break from Harken. The meeting was small and dull. Jack could not remember one word, although this was not necessarily a bad thing in an AA meeting.

  On the drive back, Jack sat next to Ed Tilman. On the seat in front, Al and Monk laughed raucously. The youths seemed to have bonded instantly and were communicating in primal teen-speak. Al was bouncing up and down, performing a rap song while slapping the back of the seat in front of him. There was, Jack thought, only one delivery for rap, a pissed-off huff, coming down with both feet on the end of each line, didactic and scolding. “It gotta burn like a bitch, you puke in a ditch, rather fight than switch, scratch it when it itch...”

  Tilman said, “I’ve lost faith, Jack.”

  Jack smiled weakly. He didn’t know if he was up to a discussion of faith.

  But Tilman continued. “Maybe that’s why I took to drinking—and yes, I did do my share of drinking, might as well admit it. I lost faith. We thought we could steer the world, a nudge here, a pat there. Take a madman out, bolster a few malcontents until they bloom into a cause. It was what you call the illusion of control. And that’s alcoholism, pure and simple, thinking you can handle it, thinking you just need to switch what you drink, only drink on weekends, only drink in social situations, always remember to eat... all that bullshit.

  “Well, I’m weary of it all, and if being sick and tired of being sick and tired is the beginning of acceptance, then I’m on that road. But it seems like a damn long road. Oh, I know, one damn day at a time, easy does it, ha
ve a nice day. The thing about this”—he held up his gloved hand— “there’s a hunger for oblivion here, termites in the soul. I been having some restless dreams, and I can’t remember them when I wake, all I’m left with is the restlessness, that wanting to do something rash. If I had faith that there was a purpose, I’d hang onto that, but I got no faith. It is easy to let go when the thing you’ve been hanging onto has turned to air. I’m thinking all that keeps me from racing into madness is a scum of fear, and I can feel that being washed away, licked clean by cold waves. There won’t be anything to hold onto soon.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jack said, realizing that he was uttering what amounted to an AA mantra. But it was true. He did know.

  Neither of them found anything else to say. In front of them, Monk and Al laughed loudly, filled with the stupid hilarity of immortal youth.

  Back in his room, Jack got undressed and fell into bed. He tried to read some, a self-help text entitled, The Jello Papers, written by a man named Herman Goldbeam and published by a small press (HG Literary Books, Inc.). Goldbeam tirelessly pursued the metaphor of jello in discussing life concepts. His entire philosophy had, he wrote, come to him during the final days of a rigorous diet, a bad time for him personally (his wife was leaving him and his novel had been receiving particularly vituperative rejections from publishers). At that time, he realized that life was, in its essence, like plain gelatin. The flavoring, strawberry, cherry, peach, was imposed by what Goldbeam referred to as existential savor. Happiness, Goldbeam explained, was a cheat. “If you want happiness, go to the movies,” he grumbled. Goldbeam said that happy people were “like stinking chocolate-covered doughnuts filled with banana cream pudding.”

  Jack could almost see Herman, a fat man in his underwear, sitting on the bed, glaring morosely at the refrigerator.

  According to Goldbeam, the trick was to embrace your own flavor of sadness, to savor its bitterness. “Substance is sadness,” he wrote.

  Goldbeam’s sentences, strangely impenetrable, must have been fashioned with some art because they did, indeed, fill Jack with sadness. He felt incredibly weary, incapable of moving, as though his bones had turned to jello. He put the book down, turned the light off, lay his head back on the pillow, and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t sleep and, finally, admitting defeat, clicked the light back on.

  Kerry’s desire chip winked on the nightstand where he had tossed it with his loose change.

  He touched the silver medallion with the tip of his index finger and instantly felt that curious tingling sensation imparted by the coin. Was this guilt, resonating within?

  He picked the chip up, closing his fingers around it. It hummed in the center of his fist. He lay back down, soothed somehow, and closed his eyes.

  The vibration eased its way up his arm, slowly turning to music as it filled his body.

  It was a country song, not one he recognized, although it had a stark and lonesome quality that suggested a bygone era. “Bartender, bartender, don’t tell me that it’s closing time,” the singer wailed. “She just walked in my memory, and I got to drink her off my mind.” A pedal steel mourned for every lovesick fool who ever lurched through a haze of cigarette smoke to search, muddled and blurry’eyed, for the jukebox song that told the truth about heartbreak.

  The truth—the gritty, buried-in-the-basement truth—was stupid, melodramatic, insipid. The singer’s voice was defeated (“I cain’t see nothing but her face. I cain’t hear nothing but her voice. Don’t tell me that you’re closing; I got this memory to chase.”).

  Some fool, smashed and soaked with self-pity, would play that song over and over, thinking of his own Louise, Mary, Ellie, Jane, Erin, whomever. The hunger got so big it became something else, an object of torture and worship (like Humbert’s Lolita, Gatsby’s Daisy).

  “All I ever wanted was to be loved,” Dorian said. He was sitting there in the booth. “What a joke. Uncle never had any love to spare. And those phonies never helped him. They just liked lording it over him. Fuck them!” A dream, Jack thought, as Dorian shrunk, became a child again, his eyes red from crying, his face round, puffy, naked. “Fuck that unconditional love! That’s a laugh. It’s not for nothing. They want to see us crawl.”

  Tears were running down the boy’s face. He picked up the beer mug, drank. He wiped his mouth. “Fight the fear, have a beer,” he said, in obvious imitation of someone else. “You love me, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” a voice said, Kerry’s voice, her warm and lilting affirmation the answer to all those haunted songs.

  Jack woke, sweating, frightened. The desire chip, clutched tightly in his hand, was cold. The clock’s red numbers told him it was a long way till morning, and he knew he wouldn’t sleep again.

  The man next to Jack at the bar was saying, “You seen that movie ? Hey, you seen it?”

  “Huh?” Jack said. He could not say just where he was; he had fogged out and just come back. He was drunk again and had been since the last week in November.

  “That movie called Leaving Las Vegas,” the man said. “You seen it?” Jack indicated that he hadn’t by shaking his head, a bad idea since it caused the man’s image to blur into several.

  “You should see that movie. It’s about a drinking feller, like you and me, who goes to Vegas and hooks up with this really fine-looking whore. He’s drinking himself to death, that’s like his plan cause he lost his job, but she don’t care cause she loves him. She’d do anything for him. I been thinking, maybe I should go to Vegas, someplace where they appreciate a drinking man, don’t treat him like dirt. In Vegas, you can be shitfaced, walking sideways, and you can go up to some fine-looking woman and say, ‘I’m drunk as a coot, and I’d sure like to dance the naked fandango with you,’ and that’s it.” The man stopped, smiled. He was a small, wizened man with a head full of big, yellow monkey teeth.

  Jack squinted, trying to narrow the man down to just one image.

  “That’s it,” the man said again. “I mean, she’s yours. She’ll do anything cause she’ll understand that you are troubled and can’t help the drinking. She won’t be always on you to stop, won’t be telling you that you are nothing hut farts and promises, won’t be throwing up her brother-in-law all the time, saying how he went to AA and is now as straight as a goddam ruler.”

  Jack nodded. He’d been to AA. But he wasn’t straight as a ruler. One day, maybe, but not this one.

  “I got to go,” he said.

  “Hey, one more,” the man said. “I’m buying.” He shouted at the bartender. “Henry. Give us two more Millers.”

  “Really got to go,” Jack said, and he slid off the barstool and headed for the door.

  “Think you are too good to drink with me, don’t you buddy? Fuck you!” the man shouted.

  Jack turned and shouted back, “You’re right. I never did like you.” Jack was pretty certain he had just met the man, but you never could tell. There were a lot of guys in bars who resembled each other. For instance, bar guys often knew a lot about sports. Bar guys often smoked and told lies about money and women. And bar guys thought that their opinions were inherently interesting (what they thought about Madonna or the Orioles or the stock market or youth today). Bar guys were often ancient and full of complaint.

  Hell was probably full of bar guys, moving slow, shouting at the widescreen TV, arguing about whether it was hotter this year than last, killing whatever charm Hell might have with the tedium of their routines (unwrapping a Slim Jim, lighting a cigarette, sprinkling salt into a beer).

  Jack came out of the bar into cold weather. It was night, cold rain falling sporadically. Fortunately, he didn’t have to drive in it. His motel was just across the street.

  Before going to the motel, he stopped at the convenience store located at the end of the strip mall.

  He bought two six-packs.

  The oriental clerk smiled, seemed to recognize him, said something and laughed. Jack thought he would have to move soon. This intimacy was insufferable.


  Back at the motel, he put the six-packs in the cooler filled with ice. This wasn’t a room to write home about—for one thing, it was home. He’d been planning on finding an apartment to rent after leaving New Way, but the way it turned out, there hadn’t been any transition time.

  He lay on the bed, tapped a cigarette from the pack—he was smoking again too—and opened a beer. He turned the television on, muted the sound, and started going through the channels with the remote. He had a lot of channels.

  I’m rich with channels, he thought. He flicked along brightly. Here was a made-for-TV movie about the Old West, the acting so bad that it made Jack wince (even without the sound). Here was a man writing on a blackboard, explaining some pyramid scheme (and drawing a pyramid). Here was It’s a Wonderful Life. Here was some sitcom (spirited old people mugging for the camera). Here was an evangelist, surrounded by the kind of people that made Jack feel sorry for God. Here was a documentary about bees or a man who had gone to live with bees. Here was a talk show, the sofa filled with what had to be basketball players. Here was an ad for cold medicine that soothed the brain by turning it green. Here was...

  When he woke, the television was still on, another talk show, kids dressed in black, a rock band or maybe vampires. The clock on the nightstand read 3:20. He got up, went to the bathroom to empty his bladder. Then he went to the cooler and got another beer. He lifted a slat in the blinds and peeked out. It was dead black, rain falling like a sermon, the strip mall across the street dark except for a shivering yellow stain, the parking lots single intact beacon.

  So it was night. A good time to mull things ewer while drinking a few beers, to calmly assess the situation, to plan one’s next move. Here at the Blue Pines Motel—a popular retreat for meditative drunkards.