Liar

by Rob Roberge

  “He?” you say.

  “This liver looks like it belongs to someone who’s drinking a fifth a day. You need to speak with this patient.”

  You say, “What do mean ‘this patient’? You mean me?”

  The woman on the end of the line says, “This isn’t Dr. Hart’s office?”

  You say no. You tell her you’re the patient. “And I haven’t had a drink in eighteen years.” You don’t mention the year on pain pills, which of course would also fuck with your liver.

  She sounds flustered. “Well…these levels. You should talk with your doctor. I’m not supposed to call the patient. I was looking for the doctor.”

  “Well you got me. So tell me what you were going to tell the doctor.”

  “I can’t,” she says.

  “Look,” you say, “the doctor’s going to tell me whatever you tell me. I won’t say you told me.”

  She pauses. Then she tells you that your levels are too high. High enough to indicate your liver isn’t functioning properly. That it looks like something called fatty liver disease. “It isn’t always, but it can be.”

  You hang up on her. You immediately freak out. Disease? You start to have trouble breathing and you can feel your heart beating and your pulse pounding in your neck and temples. You can’t believe you’ve tried this hard and stayed clean as much as you have only to have this happen. And then the anxiety takes on a momentum of its own. You feel yourself losing control, like the start of an episode. You are afraid you are going to die. That the damage you have done over the years has caught up to you and there’s nothing left that can be done. This woman’s just told you so.

  Before you know what you’re doing, you call someone you knew from AA, someone who has gone out and has been using for a couple of months. You ask him if he can get you some heroin or pills.

  “Only blow,” he says. “Or meth.”

  You’re consumed with self-hatred. You need, even if it’s not the drug you want, to be out of the head you’re in. You tell him you want an eight ball. Gayle is off teaching and you leave a note that you’re staying over in LA after band practice. You end up somewhere around Banning or Beaumont. You stop on the way and do two lines of blow at a rest stop off I-10.

  You check into some shitty cheap-looking motel, go out and buy yourself a fifth of gin, and lock yourself in your second-floor room to do more lines, knocking them back with gin that you haven’t tasted in almost twenty years. It’s warm. It stings a bit, and you are madly in love with it, despite your shame. You do one line after the other, figuring that in this one night you can’t fuck your liver more than you’ve already fucked it, but maybe you can give yourself a heart attack or can OD. You’ve seen people die of liver disease, the whites of their eyes jaundiced, along with their gray leathery skin. Toxins flooding their brain. You’re not letting that happen to you. You hate yourself for what you’ve done, but it’s too late to change it, so you’re ending it.

  But by six o’clock in the morning, you’re not dead. You’re just totally fucking wired. You walk outside onto the second-floor walkway. It’s still dark and you look at the streetlights flickering in the distance and listen to the blur of early-morning traffic on I-10 and you chew your gums and you are drunk for the first time in ages and everything beneath you looks small, like the houses and cars and trees of a miniature train set.

  For a short time, you start to feel like this would be a romantic place to die. Just end it here in the latest in a string of seedy hotels you’ve done drugs in over the years. This isn’t like your planned overdose in 2009. That was because you couldn’t stand to live another fucking day. This is because you can’t stand dying on someone else’s terms. You wouldn’t be the first loser to die in some shithole of a motel.

  Even as you are doing the blow and drinking, you know you are making a terrible mistake. You’re running low on the coke and gin. And somehow, you start calling yourself on your own bullshit. Depression consumes you as you sit in the motel. If you are going to die from what you did to your liver, well, you are going to die, but not like this. You lie on the bed, call for a late checkout, and stay there trying to sober up as much as possible. Coming up on noon, you realize you are still nowhere close to sober and you check into the room for another day and tell Gayle you’re staying in the city with a friend. You try to sleep but, predictably, can’t. You think about drinking more, but you don’t. You find yourself shaking from the fact that this all happened without any real thought. Like getting loaded was an instinct. Like hurting yourself is, no matter how hard you have tried to retrain yourself, your default setting and you will never, ever be able to change that.

  The next day, your doctor calls and tells you that your liver levels are at the high range of safe, but if you take care of yourself, you could live another forty years. The tech at the lab made some kind of error. You feel like an even bigger idiot than you did the day before, lying in that shitty motel room surrounded by empty bottles.

  You try to put this out of your mind. You decide that you will not tell Gayle, not tell any of your other friends in recovery. You fucked up. You know it. It’s over. Whether you are lying to yourself or not, you will call this a slip and not a full-blown relapse. You will go back and forth on calling it a suicide attempt. Trying to kill yourself is not a relapse, you decide. You have no idea if you are lying to yourself. Some days you think you are, some not. You will not change your sober date.

  You tell yourself, over and over and over, that you thought you were better than this.

  But you are not.

  And you may never be better than this.

  —

  APRIL 2013: After attempting to hide your mental illness from most of the people in your life since your late teens, in the end you fall apart in a very public forum.

  It’s the weekend of the release party for your fourth book. It’s also the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, at which both you and the head of your department, Tod, who is also one of your closest friends, are longstanding regulars, cracking each other up on panels annually. Writer friends come in from all over the country, to what used to be your hometown but now of course you have to drive two hours in from the desert to get to LA. You are still in bad shape, recovering from your psychotic episode in Connecticut a couple weeks prior, still not sleeping more than a couple of hours a night. You feel like hell, although you’re consoling yourself that you look pretty good, having dropped thirty-five pounds in half a year.

  Since you’ve lived in the desert, you cancel on friends more than you used to—you used to pride yourself on never canceling plans, but you can’t be that guy anymore. The truth is that if this were anyone else’s release party, you wouldn’t be there. But you can’t get out of your own party. Your band is playing. Gina’s flown in from Chicago in the middle of some crazy Midwestern storm where holes are opening in the street. Gayle has rallied even though she’s in pain, has put on a sexy black dress and is driving to LA with you, the first literary party she’s attended in ages, excited about plans you’ve been making to move back closer to the city soon. This is supposed to be your big night. Backing out isn’t an option.

  Nearly without exception, people start asking you if you’re okay from the moment you get to the party. You keep saying you’re fine. You feel okay once you’re there, actually, high on the adrenaline. Your body and brain may have been headed for this breakdown for months, but it’s started to feel normal to you. You admit to close friends that you’re exhausted, that you haven’t been sleeping. This is the truth, but not the whole truth. You don’t tell anyone that you recently totally lost your mind and you are more scared of your own head than you have been in years.

  The next night is the Los Angeles Times Book Prize awards ceremony. You tend to skip things like this, but Tod and Gina have convinced you to attend. The second you’re in the darkened auditorium, however, you’re nodding off, startling awake. You struggle to stay focused but can’t. You’re surrounded by colleagues and a
re so embarrassed you end up hopping the seats and leaving, walking into some bar on campus where you shoot pool with a few college kids and wish you could have a drink. You think, too long, about ordering one. You have to get out of there, so you end up chain-smoking outside of the auditorium, waiting for your friends in an increasing fog of exhaustion.

  There’s a dinner after the awards show. You don’t remember a single thing about it. Gina has to remind you, months later, there even was a dinner. Left to report it yourself, it never would have existed.

  At this dinner you weren’t exactly at, you’re alternately strangely giddy and at other times falling asleep on your feet. Tod drives you and Gina back to her rented bungalow, where there’s a guest room, where you’ve parked your car, making her promise not to let you drive back to the desert. You’re falling asleep in the back of Tod’s car, waking abruptly to crack jokes and becoming highly animated but slurring your words, and then you’re out again, unable to stay conscious more than a few moments at a time. But you have no memory of any of this. You remember having visual and auditory hallucinations later on, in the dead of the night, but no memory of the dinner, of the drive back from the dinner, hours lost.

  By the end of the first day of the Festival of Books, three different colleagues will approach both Tod and Gina to ask if you are back on drugs. Soon these questions evolve into rumors that you are. By the second day, Tod is being besieged by friends telling him you seem to be walking around loaded. Finally your close friend Patrick, who has spent time in San Quentin and has been an addictions counselor and doesn’t pull any punches, takes you aside and asks you point-blank if you’re using. You give him this—he has the guts to ask you to your face. He’s one of the few people you’re not mad at. You’ve known Patrick for years—he was one of your closest confidants after your relapse. But you’ve never told him what you now admit, the things you’ve been going through—what you’ve been keeping from people. He listens, like he always does. He seems to believe you. You think he’d call you on it if he didn’t, but who can be sure? Who the hell knows what another person believes? You’re getting paranoid, wanting to avoid everyone—you haven’t done anything wrong, but you feel like you have.

  All term long, you’ve been teaching several classes while slipping in and out of psychotic episodes. You’ve stayed on top of things. You’ve done a book tour. You went to the AWP conference in the middle of all this happening to your brain and body. You think you deserve a fucking medal for holding it together. You’ve been clean and sober for nineteen of the last twenty years, but this is how quickly all that evaporates, and suddenly in the eyes of the people around you, you are just a junkie. Your mind runs in defensive, angry loops: If any of them had any idea how hard I work just to function sometimes, they wouldn’t be talking the way they’re talking.

  But how could they know? You make jokes all the time, without thinking twice, about how much you want a drink or an Oxy. Hardly anyone has ever heard you talk with any depth or seriousness about being bipolar. You want to hide it, yet you want people to read your mind—to know and give you credit. That’s not how it works though. Once a junkie, always a junkie. A normal person gets exhausted, they’re exhausted. A junkie gets exhausted, he’s getting loaded.

  And, of course, when you were getting loaded during your relapse, you told everyone you were exhausted.

  What happens a week later: You are diagnosed with clinical exhaustion. A neurologist tells you it will take six months to fully recover from the taxing demands you put on your brain without knowing it. He tells you that the psychotic episodes will continue but lessen in intensity and duration if you can stick to a strict sleeping pattern: going to bed at the same time every night, and trying to get seven to eight hours; eating at the same times every day, three small meals, not the single meal you tend to eat late at night. There is no quick cure, though you’re bad off enough, the neurologist says, that you could have, in the past, been sent for the “rest cure” at some medical facility. They don’t tend to use these terms anymore (much like bipolar’s previous name, manic depression), but you’ve had, more or less, a nervous breakdown.

  Weeks later, you will tell Tod over lunch how pissed you are that no one came to you directly—that no one gave you the benefit of the doubt, and they instead turned you into some gossipy festival scandal.

  “It’s not like that,” he says. Tod, though younger than you are, is known among his friends for being a caretaker, a paternal type. “These people love you. They just don’t know how to approach something like this.”

  But you just want to demand, Something like what? Something like me?

  You are tired of other people and their judgments.

  You are even more tired of what you have done to yourself to earn it.

  You try to listen to Tod. Try to believe that everyone’s questions were meant as some form of care and love. It will be a very long time, though, before you can begin to see it this way. You still have moments when you can’t, when the hurt and humiliation seize you, wanting to morph into anger. But the truth is, you know it’s not anyone else’s fault.

  How can you tell a junkie’s lying?

  His lips are moving.

  —

  AUGUST 20, 2009: You are going to kill yourself. You sit in that shack in Wonder Valley.

  You have smoked ten of your cigarettes.

  Wind blows through the sagebrush and ground cover and birds slowly come back and perch on the rafters. You listen to the wind.

  You’ve taken a few of the pills. Just to feel a buzz once more before you die.

  You have not taken all the pills yet, but you know you will.

  All this will be gone soon. You smoke a cigarette down to the end. You’re about to flick it out the door, but instead, you blow on the cherry until it glows red and quivers small heat waves in the air. You hold it against the skin of your forearm and let it burn. You take a deep breath and try to ride with the pain. You try not to move. Try not to make a sound. You don’t move until the cigarette has burned itself out on your skin, which smells sweet and smoky in the air.

  You let out a deep, very slow breath. You think about lighting one more cigarette. Or maybe you will just take the pills now and smoke and wait for your overdose.

  You listen to everything you can. The wind blows through the scrub brush. If you are quiet enough, you can hear the lizards on the porch. The woodpecker sound of a roadrunner’s beak somewhere outside. When the wind picks up a little, it lifts and pulls at some of the corrugated metal roof. You hold your breath. You close your eyes. Pigeons coo on the support beams. Their tiny feet pat lightly on the rotting wood. The wind picks up and the wind calms. It’s loud and then it’s quiet, but it’s never quite silent if you listen close enough. And you are listening as closely as you possibly can. You are listening. You are trying to be as quiet as possible. You are erasing you. You close your eyes and you hold as still as you can and you listen.

  This is what the world will sound like without you.

  First, thanks to my terrific editor, Kevin Doughten, who helped me from the start to find the book within the book. I can’t think of a better editor to have had for this project, or any project. Thank you for your creativity and brilliance. Also, major thanks to my great agent and, more important, friend, Ryan Harbage. I owe you. Big-time.

  Special thanks to everyone at Crown Books, especially Claire Potter, who bailed me out of trouble more times than I can count and proved to be a generous asset every step of the way.

  To all of my friends who read this in various stages of development: Craig Clevenger, Gina Frangello, Josh Mohr, Patrick O’Neil, and Zoe Zolbrod. Also, for her incredible support, I owe so much to Emily Rapp.

  For publishing excerpts of the manuscript, thanks to Black Clock, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Rumpus.

  Thanks to my mother and father for always supporting me and my career, even when I didn’t make it easy. And huge gratitude always to the best big sister in the wo
rld, Diana.

  Thanks beyond words to Gina Frangello, who told me I had a book when I didn’t think I had one, and for being my closest collaborator.

  And last, to Gayle, who was the biggest supporter of me and my career for twenty-two years. I owe you more than I can ever recount here. Thank you, always.

  ROB ROBERGE is the author of four books of fiction, most recently The Cost of Living. He teaches creative writing, and his work has been widely anthologized. He also plays guitar and sings with the Los Angeles–based band the Urinals.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.