Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Oh god of bullshit, Jack thought, smile on your humble servant.

  Jack had long ago ceased to believe that alcohol would grant him clarity. That was a younger man’s dream.

  He turned the television off, inadvertently hitting the volume button first and catching a fragment of a line (“We think the audience is ready for something new, something that stretches their...” one of the black’dad girls was saying). Pop. Gone.

  Jack wished he had a copy of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous. He would have opened it at random, discovering guidance in the same way that devout Christians found solace in the Bible.

  Jack promised himself he would go to a meeting, get a new copy of the Big Book. He needed a newer edition anyway. The one that he had owned— freely given him by a small, ancient woman at one of his first meetings— was a second edition and lacked some of the insights offered in later editions.

  Jack had discovered that his book was outdated several weeks after he heard a member urge another to read page 449. “You need to get out of all that self-pity and find some acceptance,” the man had advised. “Read page 449.” Jack had not raced home and read page 449, but, in subsequent meetings, he had heard others refer to this page, and finally he had given it a look.

  The book Alcoholics Anonymous consisted of one hundred and sixty-four pages of historical material (including a discussion of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous) and another four hundred or so pages containing first-person accounts of drinking and recovery written by members. Jack flipped to page 449 and found himself in the middle of a story entitled “Joe’s Woes” in which Joe, hospitalized for drinking, was complaining to his doctor that his wife had only left him with a dollar—and that dollar, the doctor informed Joe (weary of Joe’s whining), was her last dollar. Learning this, Joe felt “pretty cheap.”

  Jack liked this story, sympathized with Joe (who had had a hard time of it, and had, once sober, lost a teenage son to a trolley accident). But Jack couldn’t understand why people were always urging others to go directly to this page when acceptance was an issue. Finally, in a Big Book study meeting, the actual passage was read, and Jack discovered that the third and subsequent editions of the Big Book contained an entirely different page 449—and a different story! This story was entitled “Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict” (a physician’s account of his drinking and drugging problems) and contained the popular “acceptance” paragraph on page 449 in which acceptance was held to be the answer to all problems.

  Jack found himself strangely troubled by this updated edition. While this new story was instructive, and the new page 449 was obviously important to many AA members, the question remained: Where the hell was Joe’s story?

  Jack imagined Joe opening up a revised copy and saying just that: “Where the hell is my story?” No doubt, Joe would read the new story, read the famous 449 paragraph in which he is assured that absolutely nothing happens by accident in God’s world. Would Joe agree, nod his head... in short, accept this? Or would he scream, “Where the blazing hell is my story!”

  Jack drank his beer and thought about Joe, thought about how this was the way of the world. The smooth and easy answers always pushed the awkward, struggling questions into the shadows. The world wanted comfort. The “light” in enlightenment had better be flattering or it wouldn’t find a market niche.

  Having no Big Book at hand, Jack reached for the book which had been in his back pocket the night he had parted company with AA and his friends at New Way.

  He opened Alcoholism and the Pnakotic Pentagon by Dorian Greenway, turned to the place he had marked and began reading.

  It was rough going. A lot of it made no sense. Perhaps it would all be more intelligible to a reader of Lovecraft. Jack had read nothing by Lovecraft. But the words and odd names that were spilled on the pages like loose change, words written, perhaps, in a amphetamine-induced rush, did not seem likely to ever yield to logic.

  In a sense, this book felt like certain products of the sixties, dense texts written by gurus and visionaries and read by kids who, fueled by LSD and other mind-altering substances, could tunnel their way into the heart of the message.

  Trying to read this stuff and puzzle it out sentence by sentence was another matter.

  Jack read:

  Nyarlarthotep is in thrall to the Outer Gods. The Gatekeeper has sickened and now orbits a single fixed point. This is the key to alcoholism, this spiral, always downward, and the cycle can only be broken by entering the pentagram, navigating by the rules set down in the Sathlattae.

  The full power of the Outer Gods cannot be harnessed until the cycle is broken. She-at-the-Center must be usurped, replaced by a new goddess so that the new Gatekeeper can claim his kingdom.

  Jack flipped forward, read:

  And Shub-Niggurath, in a burning cloud, told me that I was the chosen and should gather the faithful unto me and proceed so that the Unraveling could bring peace to those afflicted by the curse of the K’n-Yan.

  Jack flipped pages again, and came to one of those stark, autobiographical bits that occasionally surfaced amid all the arcane rhetoric:

  The Alcoholics killed my uncle. They killed him with kindness and lies.

  I swore I would not go to them when the curse ravaged my own soul. Instead, I entered the labyrinth.

  Jack put the book back on the nightstand, got up, and went to the cooler.

  He plunged his hands into the ice, fumbling for another beer. He paused, hands in the freezing sludge, and thought, Am I okay1 He waited for the answer. Yeah. Fine so far.

  These little spot checks were important. When you returned to drinking, it could get out of hand quickly. You might find yourself hallucinating in a strange bathroom while something, a dog, a bear, a crazy person, whimpered behind the door. That was just an example (drawn from last summer’s files). The point was: You’d be some place you hadn’t intended to be, and you would not be at your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual best.

  Jack retrieved a beer and dried his hands on a dish towel. He went over to the room’s only chair, an overstuffed armchair upholstered in green vinyl.

  He’d been drinking for about two weeks. Had he been eating? Well, not today. He would eat tomorrow, maybe get a big breakfast.

  Jack sat in the chair and lit another cigarette. He knew that the concept of breakfast was enticing when bolstered by several late-night beers. But it would be different tomorrow. Tomorrow he would be sick, shaking, confused. Who is the President of the United States? would be a trick question.

  He might drift around the room, might throw up some, might contemplate killing himself, joining a Christian commune, calling an ambulance. He might sob helplessly for a while or sit very still attempting to decide if, in fact, the left side of his brain were melting or if his tongue were turning to cheese. He might drink several more beers, shaking violently, then, curiously renewed, feel on top of things, imagine that he had already conquered his alcoholism through some mystical insight. He might call his old high-school girlfriend—a dozen calls first to discover her number— and, when she answered, he might scream, “You bitch!” and slam down the receiver. He might do many things, but he suspected that the one thing he would almost certainly not do was eat breakfast.

  There were some potato chips somewhere in the room. Maybe he should eat them while he was thinking about it. He found the bag lying next to the chair. That was easy.

  The chips were flavored: steak and onions. Not bad. He stuffed a few handfuls into his mouth.

  He spied his reflection in the gold-framed mirror over the sofa. “I know I’m pathetic,” he told his reflection. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to watch me eat potato chips?”

  Jack stopped, scared, suddenly aware of what he was doing. He was talking to his reflection. Didn’t he ever learn anything?

  Talking to reflections was why he was here, drinking his way toward the nuthouse or death in a motel in—well, the newspaper called itself the Clifton Clarion but then there w
as that knockout question: Where in the gypsy-jesus wilderness was Clifton?

  To be honest, it wasn’t just one thing that had sent him here. It was a set of circumstances, tumbling like dominoes.

  Maybe he needed to think about that. If he was going to get out of here intact, maybe he needed to have a very precise idea of how he had come to be here in the first place. AA members would approve of that, of assessing the situation, of taking a hard look at his own part rather than easing into some victim role.

  Jack saw that Martin and Hubert were convinced that Kerry was still out there somewhere, and they intended to find her. Jack wondered if their aggressive optimism was the result of having been in AA for years (where people did rally in extraordinary ways, derelicts sobering up to become company executives, parents reunited with errant children, hopeless recidivists celebrating years of clear-eyed recovery in the company of spouses and offspring).

  Jack had no history of miracles. For him, good times had a way of going bad, celebrations carried the seeds of sorrow, and the most unbearable stories were the ones that began, That morning, they were very happy. They had packed a picnic lunch; the day was balmy, the sky cloudless and blue.

  The best Jack could do, in the optimism department, was keep silent.

  He did this while being chauffeured to AA meetings at night and, during the day, traveling around with Martin, Hubert, and Tilman in an attempt to discover something that might lead them to Dorian Greenway. The drifting, derelict kids who had once comprised The Clear and now sat hunched in doorways or attended AA meetings where they sat, vacanteyed and silent (like birds returned to a bulldozed nesting site) were no help. Some of them did not seem to recognize the name Dorian Greenway, and none of them knew where he was.

  Jack was uncomfortable in the presence of these ex-cult members, noting a girl with two missing fingers, a boy on crutches. Had they left parts of themselves in some alternate dream world? Or had young Monk’s imagination been goosed into overdrive by illicit drugs?

  In any event, these lost children knew nothing of their leader’s whereabouts. Neither did anyone else.

  Hubert had hired investigators. They ransacked Dorian’s past—and his uncle’s as well—hoping to find some clue to his present location. When it was learned that Dorian had lived for several years in Chapel Hill, investigators down there were engaged. Perhaps Dorian was back in Chapel Hill. A laconic PI in a brown suit, when asked by Hubert to explain why Dorian might be expected to turn up in Chapel Hill said, shrugging, “We go where we been.”

  Those words had come at the end of the first week of the abortive search for Dorian and Kerry. The investigator had been leaving New Way, preparing to get in his car (a battered, boat-sized Cadillac that suggested past success and present decline). Hubert had shouted the question, and the man had shrugged, answered and ducked in his car, driving away in an oily cloud of smoke.

  We go where we been. The words sank to the bottom of Jack’s heart, lay in the muck there, a black ooze of experience that recognized such sentiments. We go where we been. Truth. We scrounge up a couple of patterns when we are young, and we ride those poor, blind horses till they drop. Around and around.

  Life is short. Nonsense. Life is way too long not to notice its circular nature.

  It is embarrassing to do the same dumb thing over and over. Surely there are plenty of ways in which a man can misfire, can sabotage his life. Why not more variety?

  But most men and women seemed stuck with a half dozen dysfunctional tricks, using them over and over again. The man who kept marrying women, kept being amazed that they turned into bitches. He’d tell you about it, pausing to leer at the blonde laughing near the coffee pot. The woman who always got mixed up with men who stole her money never learned not to flirt with ex-felons.

  Being a human being was embarrassing. It was like being a chipmunk perched on the head of an elephant. You had to make the best of it. If that elephant decided to lumber off to the lake and hurl itself in, you could salvage your dignity by saying, “I’m thirsty; think I’ll mosey down to the lake.” But whatever you said, you were going to get wet.

  We go where we been.

  They went, again, to the Happy Roads AA Club. Jack hadn’t wanted to go. The strangeness of those meetings, their strong psychic echo of Dorian’s Lovecraft days, made Jack uneasy.

  Sitting in the overheated, smoke-laden room, Jack closed his eyes and watched, again, as Wesley Parks ran down the snowy steps and climbed into the black van. This vision initiated a mental film fest, all the stock footage of that night, and ended with Dorian Greenway licking Kerry’s hand.

  It had started here. Jack hated this place.

  An old man wearing a flat straw hat and a red striped shirt as though dressed for some musical revue talked about the death of his dog with such poignancy that Jack found himself drawn in, in spite of himself, sucker-punched by empathy for someone whose appearance should have guaranteed distance.

  The next person to speak, a pear-shaped woman with frizzy hair, told everyone that she was pleased with herself, having, that very day, told her mother to go to Hell.

  Everyone nodded. “All right!” someone shouted. Had the woman told the group that she had refrained from telling her mother to go to Hell, heads would have nodded with equal fervor, and an “All right!” would have erupted from another corner.

  Jack still didn’t know what to make of this phenomenon. In sobriety, any change in behavior could be the object of self-congratulation if viewed in the proper light. The woman who had told her mother to go to Hell was applauding her newfound assertiveness. The woman who had refrained from telling her mother to go to Hell could congratulate herself on her restraint.

  Human nature was such a knot of arrogance and humility, self-deception and simple decency. In the course of any AA meeting, Jack could find himself being deeply moved, bored, disgusted, amused, skeptical, angry, inspired.

  He loved this place. And hated it.

  And, for the moment at least, he needed fresh air.

  He walked down the stairs, past the framed photos of Lois, Dr. Bob, the house in Akron. He peeked into the social club on the first floor, saw the usual ancients engaged in earnest games of bridge, and kept going.

  Outside it was cold, a metallic chill that pressed against his face, numbing the flesh almost instantly. Had there been the slightest wind, it would have sent him back inside, but the stars were out, the air still, and he was determined to smoke a cigarette. Besides, the room within would seem more welcoming if he let this hostile night bite at his flesh for a few minutes.

  He thought the unoriginal thought: that life was only appreciated in contrasts. He’d heard someone say at a meeting that, for an alcoholic, the absence of pleasure was pain.

  Ouch, Jack had thought.

  Emerson had said that the unexamined life was not worth living, but it seemed to Jack that there was an endless, busy-monkey analysis that could, with time, render the examination meaningless. When Jack’s self-pity reached out and embraced his fellow humans, he felt sorry for the whole jabbering lot. He saw them crowded on an imperiled planet that was rocketing through the terrifying vacuum of space. They all were talking in rapid-fire, tiny voices, because they had the gift of speech and the curse of self-awareness that drove them to fill up the mystery with words, hoping no one would notice what a paltry defense those words were against the void.

  Ouch.

  Jack heard it then, a slippery sound that poked at his heart, tentatively, the way a child’s finger might test the frosting of a chocolate cake.

  The sound of a pedal steel guitar.

  Jack blinked at Bob’s Beer Palace, the beer-mosaic sign, the parking lot with its half dozen cars.

  He found himself walking across the street, his heart beating faster with the certainty that it was—yes—that song, the song from his dream. He reached in his pocket and found the desire chip. It vibrated. He clenched it in his fist, his talisman.

  When he pushed open t
he door, he was greeted by the smell of stale beer and cigarettes and ammonia. And he heard, blooming inside his skull, that weary, working-man’s voice, pleading, “Bartender, bartender, don’t tell me that it’s closing time.”

  He walked into the bar, wending past empty tables in the dim light that excused the dirty floor, the chipped tables, the stains on the walls. Instinctively, he moved away from the few people clustered at the center of the long bar. He moved to the end, pulled himself up on the stool, eased his elbows onto the counter.

  “I got to drink her off my mind,” the jukebox crooned.

  He inhaled the atmosphere, dank, thick as Faulkner’s densest prose. It was not a welcoming atmosphere to the uninitiated. To Jack, it was splendid. He realized that the two odors that packed the most punch for him were odors that would not win prizes with any olfactory connoisseur. The second of these beloved odors was the reek of bars such as this. The first odor—the effluvia that was freighted with a thousand fond memories—was the smell of old libraries and small, used bookstores, the smell of mildew thoughtfully masticating the words of geniuses and hacks.

  Both of these odors were not, of course, attractive per se. His response was Pavlovian, the excitement engendered by delights to come.

  Probably there were many things that were loved, not for what they were, but for what they heralded.

  An old girlfriend, who loathed anything alcoholic, had asked (with an air of great disbelief) if he really liked the taste of beer, and he had said, “Absolutely!” But how did you separate the taste from the effect?

  Jack sat at the bar, quiet. He pressed Kerry’s desire chip between his palms. It fluttered softly, like a moth. His heart had ceased beating rapidly and he felt calm. He studied himself in the long mirror that ran behind a carnival of bottles. He was wearing a black sweatshirt, so that his face floated in the dim light, pale, an innocuous, forgettable countenance, the sort of face which might change depending upon what you knew about its wearer (like a newspaper photo of some smiling young man revealed to be, say, a serial killer; now something not-right lodges clearly in those too-blue eyes; those lips, too red, are charged with a rapacious, deadly hunger).