Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

  Aaron flew down the road, taking the country turns without braking, perhaps in homage to the absent Martin (another fearless driver). Jack pined for Hurley detox’s Earl Simms who drove as though the whole world were a school zone.

  Jack got back just in time for group, which was being led by Gretchen.

  “I am leading this meeting because I am staff,” Gretchen said. “And I know Martin would want us to continue until he returns. My primary expertise is in word processing and accounting, so you are just going to have to bear with me. I know you would rather have Martin here.” She paused. Her eyes, round and wide, blinked behind her glasses. “Well, so would I,” she said. “So would I!” She took her glasses off and sobbed into her hands. Eunice got up and walked over to the sofa and sat down next to Gretchen and hugged her. Eunice’s eyes were red, and she started sobbing too. Their shoulders shook as, locked in a sisterhood of sorrow for their missing men, they wept.

  “This ain’t doing nothing for me,” Gates said to Jack. Gates seemed to have gotten darker, smaller and angrier since Jack had last seen him. “This ain’t helpin my alkyholism one bit.”

  It wasn’t a big group: Aaron, Jack, Gates, Ed Tilman, and the two women sobbing on the sofa. Their numbers had been pared down. We are the... survivors, Jack thought, although the first word that had come to mind—and been discarded for its negative connotations—had been dregs. Gretchen regained control of herself and led group.

  When Jack confessed that he had been drinking, she hit him with a rolled-up People magazine.

  “That’s no way to lead group,” Tilman snapped. “Get ahold of yourself, woman.”

  “Oh, I didn’t hurt him,” Gretchen said. “Did I hurt you, Jack?”

  “That’s not the point,” Tilman said. “It’s not professional. It’s therapeutically unproductive.” Jack noted that Tilman still had the black glove on his right hand and that he rubbed his forearm a lot, as though scratching an itch through the fabric.

  Gretchen’s voice quivered. “I’m just trying to carry on. I just...”

  “Don’t anyone be cryin,” Gates grumbled.

  Jack interrupted. “I don’t think it is another group therapy session we need in any event,” he said. “I think we need to settle on some course of action that gets Martin and Hubert and Kerry back.”

  Everyone agreed. Since it was almost time for dinner, they decided to hold their council of war on full stomachs. Group was adjourned.

  Jack drifted into the rec room and Tilman, seated on a sofa in front of the TV, turned and shouted, “Jack. Come over here. Look at this.”

  Tilman had been watching a local news broadcast. He had wanted to find out what the weather was up to. Interest in the weather, like the conviction that you have left the house without turning off the stove, was something that increased with age. “I’m getting old,” Tilman had told Jack. “I need to get the weather three, maybe four times a day.”

  So Tilman had turned the television on and discovered a local news announcer, a sharp-featured, pretty woman in a suit who was smiling fiercely (and probably thinking, What am I doing on this cold, windy fucking mud flat?). She was speaking into the camera. Behind her, bright yellow and red tents were going up amid much industry, big trucks and canvas tarps flapping.

  A pond, its black water rippled by gusts of wind, shivered with colored lights.

  “It’s going to be a big day in Harken, Virginia, tomorrow,” the announcer was saying. “An estimated thirty thousand folks will be attending the four-day Whole Addiction Expo. Last year, this event, the recovery event of the year, was held in San Francisco, a logical choice. But what brings the Whole Addiction Expo, and its dozens of celebrity writers, actors, singers, and recovery experts, to Harken? The answer is local millionaire and philanthropist, Dorian Greenway, who is with us today. The Expo will be held on his property. Only weeks ago, Mr. Greenway was the victim of arsonists and many thought that the event would have to be rescheduled but...”

  Jack blinked in disbelief.

  “Yeah,” Tilman said, nodding his head. “I just plopped down here, turned the TV on, and look. What’s this load of crap?”

  Jack’s nemesis, Dorian Greenway, wearing a blue windbreaker, was nodding his head, smiling. “Oh, I wasn’t about to cancel,” he was staying. “We lost the house, but all the other buildings are intact—and I’m told there will be no problem heating the tents. The Expo is personally very important to me. I’ve had my own problems with addiction, and my uncle... well, Harken is a small town, and everyone in Harken knows his story, and all I can say is his tragedy has become my cause. I want to see alcoholism and drug addiction defeated in my lifetime.”

  The interviewer smiled at this wrap-line and said, “So just what is the Whole Addiction Expo? Let’s go back to the studio for a look at an event that could easily be called the Woodstock of the nineties.”

  Jack thought about Dorian Greenway, philanthropist and millionaire, welcoming the world’s recovery community.

  What the hell? Jack thought.

  The news show ran interview clips of some famous folks scheduled to attend the Expo. A celebrity actor named Alan Cort, who had been chemically clean for three months and was completing a book entitled My Struggle with Darkness, My Commitment to Light, said he just wanted to help people. Brad Budge, author of ten self-help best-sellers, touted his latest, Twelve Steps in Twelve Days. He was a large man with a beard, very serious. “I want the whole world in recovery,” he said, frowning at the camera.

  There were people hawking vitamins, crystals, dream therapy. A man with a round face and long blond hair, dressed in Native American garb, beat a drum and chanted. He was identified as Owl Laughingfire, author of Drums to Recovery.

  A stern, dark-haired woman glared at the camera and gestured with her cigarette. “Addiction is a feminist issue,” she said. She nodded her head violently. “Exactly. Somebody’s got drugs, somebody needs drugs. That’s about power, right? Where are women in any power struggle? The bottom. Male dominance equals drugs, that’s the equation.” She glared at the camera, nodded her head, sucked on her cigarette.

  A popular spiritual guru named John Mahler (author of The Astral Kiss, The Astral Kiss Diaries, My Search for the Astral Kiss, The Astral Kiss Workbook, Beyond the Astral Kiss, et cetera) said, “Addiction is a product of imperfect perception. As though I were to look at you and see the suit you were wearing and not see you. Addiction is a manifestation of spiritual confusion, mistaking fabric for essence.”

  Tilman aimed the remote at the television and turned it off.

  “If I were evolution, I’d be ashamed,” Tilman said, and he got up and left the room.

  At dinner, everyone was subdued. Dessert was banana pudding, and Jack found himself thinking fondly of Wesley Parks and wishing the counselor had not been dragged off to an alternate world by a mad dog. Missing someone you never liked is one of the top seven signs of an impending breakdown. Jack realized he would have to watch himself, keep a very close eye on his mental health.

  After dinner, everyone sat around the dining room table. Jack brought them up to date, beginning with that moment when he had left the AA meeting at Happy Roads and drifted across the street.

  “Bob’s Beer Palace,” Jack said. “That’s where Dorian Greenway is. At least, that’s where he was. He might not actually be inside the building. I mean, it may just be a sort of doorway to where he actually is, where he goes. He may be in some sort of alternate dimension created—made possible might be more accurate—by his uncle. I spoke to Ezra’s murdered wife, Anita Coldwell—well, a simulacrum of her, I guess—and I’ve since thought about what she said, that Dorian was using his uncle as a kind of battery. I think Ezra is the source of psychic energies that Dorian can harness to his own ends.”

  It was rough going explaining this, and Jack couldn’t read the expressions of his comrades. “I don’t know if Dorian and his uncle are still at Bob’s Beer Palace, but I know they were there. I know because tha
t’s where I was headed with McPhee. I have no memory of what happened once we got there. I know I woke up in a straitjacket in a mental ward that doesn’t exist in this world. Obviously, McPhee and I encountered Dorian, and he sent us there.”

  Ed Tilman spoke. “Okay. Fine. Assuming Greenway is still holed up in that bar, what are we going to do about it? You don’t know how it went last time, but you know the result. There you were in a straitjacket. If we all go breaking down his door, what’s to keep the lot of us from waking up in strait jackets? And maybe, this time, there won’t be anyone to lead us back, to say, ‘Wake up.’ What are we going to do different? You don’t even know what you did last time except that you obviously didn’t slip up on the man’s blind side. Hie saw you coming.”

  Jack nodded. “McPhee and I were both pretty drunk. I expect we may have acted rashly. We’ll use caution this time. Happy Roads AA can be our base of operations. We’ll have to trust that more will be revealed once we have the lay of the land.”

  Ed was shaking his head. “You are saying you don’t have a plan.”

  “Not yet. I think we need to drive to Happy Roads, take it from there.”

  “Okay,” Tilman said, “but let me make a phone call first. I don’t have any authority, but I’ve still got some friends.”

  Aaron parked the van in the lot, and they all walked across the street to Happy Roads. Overhead, a helicopter diced the cold night air.

  Tilman looked up. “Those boys move fast,” he said. He turned to Jack. “If two crickets are humping behind the dumpster, those guys up there know about it.”

  There were about ten people downstairs at Happy Roads. Four of those people were playing bridge, silent, serious players with no interest in small talk. The others—except for a man reading a newspaper in a far corner— were clumped around the television.

  The whole surviving rehab had come (Aaron, Gretchen, Ed, Eunice, Gates and Jack).

  Jack steered them to a table and took out a deck of cards.

  “I have to make another phone call,” Tilman said. “Give me a quarter.”

  Jack fished a quarter from his pocket and handed it to Tilman, who tossed it jauntily in the air, caught it, and was already moving toward the pay phone.

  “He’s a spry old muther,” Gates said. “And up to something.”

  By the time Tilman returned, Gates and Gretchen had already gotten into an argument about the poker game underway.

  “Eights and black threes are always wild,” Gretchen was saying.

  “That ain’t poker,” Gates grumbled. “That’s old-maids-in-a-closet and that’s for chillun and simple people. We are playing honest poker, ain’t nothin wild but your gamblin heart.”

  Tilman was smiling when he sat down. “I just checked on the operation. Here’s the lowdown. There are four people at the bar—probably regulars, probably not involved. Then there is the bartender and his girlfriend. Upstairs there are two men; both have weapons, automatic rifles. All the rooms appear to be empty except for one with a bed. There’s someone in that bed. It’s a three-bounce shot, so that’s the best they can do.”

  “Ezra Coldwell,” Jack said.

  Tilman grinned. “People can bad-mouth the government all they want, I’d say my old coworkers did us proud.”

  “Guess you didn’t work for the postal service,” Jack said.

  Tilman frowned. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “Well, yes,” Jack said.

  “There are places you don’t want to tell a joke like that. Not every post office is what it seems, and some of those postal workers with machine guns weren’t firing blindly.”

  Tilman regarded the others at the table. He stood up. “You folks go on playing your game,” Tilman said, smiling at Eunice (who, if Jack wasn’t mistaken, was furtively studying Gretchen’s cards as they were reflected in the glass of a framed serenity prayer). “Jack and I will be back shortly.” Tilman clapped an arm around Jack’s shoulder and led him outside. The helicopter was gone; the sky full of stars. Bob’s Beer Palace looked welcoming, the words Miller Lite scrawled in a blue neon script just to the right of a small, square window full of golden promise.

  “I went ahead and made an executive decision,” Tilman said. “Didn’t have time to consult you.” Tilman sat on the steps, fumbled for a cigarette, found one and lit it. He stared at Bob’s Beer Palace. “You don’t have a lot of helicopter traffic in Harken, so they were bound to get suspicious. I told my boys to get the hell out, come back quiet.”

  Tilman shot Jack a look that seemed fraught with meaning. “This is a hostage situation; they got Martin, Hubert, Kerry. There’s only one word for the sort of response you want in a situation like this.” Tilman was squinting at Jack. “Decisive,” Tilman said.

  “Decisive?”

  “Exactly.”

  Tilman offered a cigarette to Jack. Jack shook his head. “I’m trying to quit,” he said.

  The front door of Bob’s Beer Palace opened, and a dark figure leaned out, waved, and ducked back inside. Ed Tilman stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Looks like we got the ball.”

  Jack followed.

  “Commander,” one of the men in black said, smiling. He balanced an assault rifle in the crook of his right arm.

  Tilman nodded, looked around. “So, John? How are we doing?”

  “Everything secure, sir. We have a guard on the one in the bed.”

  “And the others?”

  “All down.”

  Ed nodded, turned, and headed for the stairs leading to the second floor. Jack followed. “Down?” Jack said. “He means dead, right? I thought you said the people in the bar had nothing to do with any of this?”

  Ed started up the stairs, one veined hand on the banister. “I said they probably weren’t involved. We had to move fast here,” Tilman said. “It’s too bad about those people. Seeing as how we are both alcoholics, undergoing treatment, it might make sense to view those recently departed in the context of alcohol abuse. If they had stayed away from the enticements of Bob’s Beer Palace, they’d be alive now.”

  “Those were innocent people,” Jack said.

  “Let’s not wallow in guilt,” Tilman said, reaching the top step. “Alcoholism is a disease, we both know that, and I’m not about to take responsibility for every alcohol-related death that comes down the pike. This the room?” Another soldier nodded and moved away from the door.

  Kerry.

  She lay on top of the bed, her arms at her sides. She was wearing a blue dress with small white dots. Jack recognized the dress; it was the same dress Anita Coldwell had worn when she had sat across from Jack, drinking gin and tonics in the bar’s mirror.

  Kerry’s eyes were closed, and she looked different. Her hair, Jack realized, was cut short, was... Jack reached down and removed the wig to reveal a shaven head. Kerry opened her eyes as he did so, smiled lazily. “Hey, Jack,” she said. She turned her eyes, “Ed.”

  They helped her up. She wobbled a little.

  “You are going to be okay,” Jack said.

  Kerry smiled wanly.

  Downstairs, one of the soldiers wrapped a jacket around her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here,” Jack said.

  I had a dream about you,” Kerry said. They were hack at New Way, sitting in the dining room. It was one in the afternoon, the day after Kerry’s rescue. They had just finished eating lunch.

  Jack smiled encouragingly.

  Kerry smiled back. “Yeah. I dreamed that you had been drinking again and that you wound up in a mental hospital. I could see you, through a window or something, but you couldn’t hear me when I shouted. You just shuffled along, looking so sad and sort of, well, stupid, like I wanted to kick you. I decided to write my poem on the window, hoping you would see it, maybe—I don’t know, you do things in dreams that aren’t entirely logical, you know—and, sure enough, you saw my poem, and you shouted, Where am I!, and I knew, I knew where you were, although that was kind of crazy, like something I’d heard in a meeting,
you know.”

  “You took your lipstick and wrote on the window,” Jack said. “You wrote, You are in denial.”

  Kerry blinked at Jack, her mouth half open. Jack wanted to touch her lower lip with his index finger, but he was fairly certain that giving in to this impulse would shock and appall the girl.

  “How did you know that?” Kerry said.

  “Because I did drink again, and I did wind up in such a place. Because...” Jack didn’t know how much to tell. Kerry remembered very little about the last weeks, and what she did remember was floating up in fragments she identified as dreams. Jack thought it was probably best to let this remembering continue its slow, piecemeal materialization. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt now—and had abandoned the wig.

  “I kind of like this look,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “You look good,” he said. It was true. She had the high cheekbones, regal bearing, and youthful insouciance to carry off this shorn state. Seeing her, hairdressers would despair.

  Ed Tilman came into the dining room and said, “There’s something you need to see on television.”

  Ed had rounded everyone up, and he sat them down in front of the television. He knelt down and popped a tape into the VCR. “I want to get this on tape,” he said.

  A man with a mustache was saying, “...epidemic of religious persecution. In fact, these bombings are not, as was first surmised, motivated by religious zealots. Churches were only incidentally the targets. These bombs were, in fact, detonated in church basements for the purpose of disrupting and destroying meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. The New York bombing and the videotape that came in its wake have confirmed this.”

  Jack watched as the newsroom switched to the press conference that occurred after the bombing of the Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Office.