Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  One day Kari asked, “So when are you going to propose to me?”

  I hadn’t thought I should. We weren’t really in that kind of love. Despite our childish romanticism, Kari and I never used the term “soul-mates” in reference to each other. We said “I love you,” and that was it.

  “A magician never reveals his secrets,” I said, then hauled my spineless ass to the mall to find affordable rings.

  Once equipped with her gold band and small center-mounted diamond, Kari told her friends all about it, how excited she was. We didn’t set a date—we were still thinking about it. My mother volunteered to help shop for anything Kari needed, be it stationary or centerpieces. Mom even bought us a copy of Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette.

  Our parents met, shared a meal, and visited each other’s homes. As anaesthetized as I was, I constantly wondered what I’d gotten myself into, but a sham boyfriend deserved a sham engagement. Kari did not.

  We would never set a date.

  When I walked into the kitchen many months after the proposal, Kari pointed to the coffee table. “What is this?” A textbook lay on its side, exposing what I’d foolishly left hidden underneath it: the bent spoon, cut straw and tin of Altoids mints containing four balloons.

  My head went light. Everything flashed white.

  “It’s—” What could I say? I braced myself against the doorframe. “It’s heroin.”

  A stream of demands and regrets and obscenities flowed from Kari’s mouth, and I agreed with them all: I was a jerk, I had betrayed her, how could I be so sneaky and lowdown to hide something like this. She’d let me move in and this is how I treated her?

  She crossed her arms. “Do you have a problem?”

  I said I didn’t. I’d just bought some on a whim the last time I visited friends in Phoenix. I was stressed, I explained. I thought it would help. It was a mistake. I wouldn’t do it again. “Promise,” I told her. “I’ll throw it out.” She stared at me. “Seriously. You can watch me do it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ll just get more.” I told her that wasn’t true. But when she turned her head before following me to the bathroom, I slipped two balloons in my pocket and flushed the others down the toilet so quickly she couldn’t count the total as they swirled in the bowl.

  I wish I’d thought of this as the de facto intervention that I needed, but all it meant was I had to be more cautious.

  I made excuses to take drives: gotta run to the library. Gotta run and get some groceries. I’ll pick up the movie and Indian food, you just stay here and relax honey. Then I’d mix a batch in my truck and snort it while leaning below the dashboard for cover. Kari grew suspicious.

  When I returned home she’d say, “Why were you gone so long? I thought you were coming back at six?” When I stayed too long in the bathroom she said, “Are you okay in there? You fall in or something?” I’d crack the bathroom door to feign transparency, sliding the Altoids tin and spoon under the rug behind the toilet. Each hour of every day presented the same enormous risk. I had trouble maintaining the ruse.

  Once I dozed off at dinner at her parent’s house. Kari and I, her folks, her younger sister Diane, and brother and his wife were seated around the large dining room table. It was antique and dark-stained, set with matching chairs and shiny silver centerpieces. Before her father brought out his expensive decanted port wine, we talked and passed around food. Someone said something, and apparently my eyes were closed when they looked over for my response. I don’t remember this. Of course I don’t.

  Kari’s dad was a doctor. He was an affable if distant man who watched a lot of televised sports in his bedroom and, understandably, wanted to protect his daughter. Later that night he asked Kari if I had a drug problem and, to my surprise, she defended me. “No,” she told him, “He doesn’t have a problem. He doesn’t do any of that stuff.” That ended the discussion but not his apprehension. Learning of this conversation a decade later, I wondered how Kari failed to make the connection between my narcolepsy and what she’d found in our kitchen the previous year. She knew me back in high school when my friends and I had wild reputations. She must not have been surprised. Maybe she was more naïve than I thought, so innocent that she couldn’t even see the signs. Or maybe, as I assume, she chose to ignore them.

  She was privately struggling with her own issues: teaching at a Montessori school while questioning the value of her Sociology degree; worrying about her weight; struggling with her high school eating disorder; trying various diets and worrying about whether or not she was pursuing the right career. If my presence offered any comfort for her anxieties, it must have been small. She kept a little log of her calories in a journal each day, then planted herself in front of the TV at night. Maybe she needed to live in as deep a fantasy as I did, one generated not from drugs but from the narcotic of television, snacking, and occasional drinking with her friends. Maybe, like me, she needed to find one thing in life to cling to, something stable to weather the challenging transition from adolescence to adulthood and, for some reason, she chose our relationship. Like me, she seemed unwilling to admit that our relationship was doomed to fail, and so she blocked out any evidence of its disintegration, choosing instead to invest all her hope in us, and me, no matter how misguided. Whatever her reasons, as I filled up on opiates each day, we each lived our separate fantasies: I thought I could get away with using indefinitely, and she thought she was involved in a promising relationship. She never confronted me, never asked “Are you still using?” or “Are you high?” because, like everything else in our relationship, we never talked openly about the issues that mattered most: when were we getting married? Did she really want to move with me to the Pacific Northwest? Why wasn’t I as excited discussing her students as I was discussing books? We maintained the fantasy by speaking only of the easy stuff: classes, homework, her day at work, what we should cook for dinner.

  It still shocks me to think about how something as obvious as my intoxication can remain secret. But secret and unacknowledged aren’t the same things. People often see what they want to see, and sometimes what is secret isn’t what is hidden, it’s only what’s ignored.

  The Phoenix dealers were usually reliable. For months they kept me well-supplied. When they stopped answering their phones, I assumed they’d been caught or their suppliers had dried up, so I went to a neighborhood south of downtown.

  I met a middle-aged woman on the street one morning, and after confirming I was cool (“You a cop?” “No.”), she became my new reliable. She’d climb into the passenger seat, run inside various unkempt houses, then slip back in my truck. She pinned her thirsty hair down with a comb, and the pink jogging suit she wore smelled like an overstuffed hamper and instant mashed potatoes. Her thin forearms sometimes bore a large and leaking scab. One morning while scratching it she said, “I got this bad abscess, from skin-popping.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I watched which parts of the upholstery her dirty hands touched so I knew what to disinfect. The clinic that gave her methadone paid no attention to urine tests, though she kind of wished it did. One morning she stared out the passenger side window and said, “Be glad you don’t inject.”

  That summer, my future father-in-law bought me and his family tickets to see the Arizona Diamondbacks. Some of Kari’s cousins had flown in from Texas, and while I’d never cared for baseball, I wanted to meet them. They’d heard nice things about me, and I relished that information, figuring that either my ruse was still holding up, or that I wasn’t a complete degenerate. On the day of the game, my connection requested I stop at the liquor store on 7th Avenue. It was summer, scorching hot. I’d borrowed Kari’s car for its potent air conditioning and assumed that this, like all the other trips, would be a short one.

  As my connection stepped from the car, a cop pulled onto the street behind me. Without thinking, I turned right onto 7th and immediately the red and blue lights flared. My slick palms spun the wheel as I ran through my options. If I tossed t
he drugs out the window, the officer would see. If I pocketed them, the cop would find them, because in that neighborhood there was going to be a pat down. So I did what street dealers do and shoved the balloons in my mouth, all the while praying they hadn’t been in anyone else’s.

  I parked on the highway onramp. “Hi,” the officer said. “License and registration please.” She stood just behind my doorframe and explained that she pulled me over because of the area’s high drug activity. “You know this isn’t a safe place to be, right?” I said I did not. I was just getting a soda at the liquor store. When she asked where the soda was, I said I hadn’t gone in yet. She told me to step out of the car.

  I stood beside Kari’s clean gray Acura, answering the officer’s questions, which I didn’t initially realize were intended to not only extract information but confirm by my awkward lilt that there was something under my tongue.

  After a brief exchange she said, “Spit it out Aaron. Don’t swallow it. Make this easy on yourself.”

  My eyes darted wildly. Her voice remained firm: “Come on. Don’t make this difficult. Spit it out.”

  I wondered what would happen if I didn’t. Would the balloons burst in my stomach and cause me to OD? Or would I just get really serene and think this was a dream?

  Gripping her black belt as if preparing to pounce and pry open my mouth, the officer said, “Do it. Spit it out.” I nodded my head and spit the balloons into my palm. I told her I wouldn’t make trouble then admitted why I’d come. She sat me on the curb and placed the evidence in her car.

  When she returned she said she was sorry for having to do this, but would I please turn around. And right there, in front of passing traffic near a highway my family and I had driven countless times, she bent my arms behind my back, tightened the cuffs around my wrists and wedged me into her narrow back seat. “What happens to my car?” I said. It would be impounded; I could pick it up later. “Later?” I said. Of course—I was going to jail.

  I didn’t cry. I didn’t beg her not to take me. I resigned to my fate and just stared out the window at the gritty side of my city.

  The silence of the drive was smothering. If her radio had been squealing at high volume, I was so lost in thought I don’t think I would have heard it. My sweaty back pressed my hands against the vinyl. To make conversation, the officer asked where I was born, where my family was. She was surprised this was my first drug arrest. In a moment of clarity, I told her this was exactly what I needed.

  Until that moment I had always considered the war on drugs a misguided approach to protecting the citizenry: how could you battle substance abuse by curbing the supply? This was a demand-side issue. You had to make people want to not use drugs and help those who did use with a psycho-social, systems-thinking approach; until then, in our capitalist economy, someone would always be willing to sell. Also, it was wrong to criminalize people with addictions since being hooked on coke wasn’t the same as rape or murder. We all had problems, and we medicated in different ways. I still feel that way. But in that moment, the adrenaline and cold handcuffs helped me see things differently. Jail time and parole could either force me to sober up, or lead me toward some darker pole.

  I thanked her, saying this arrest would snap me out of it, even though I didn’t know if anything could. “Well,” she said, “make that happen.”

  She pulled onto a disheveled residential side street to talk to another officer in a car. Then, without warning, she stepped out, opened my door and uncuffed me—more comfortable, she said. I doubt this would have happened if I wasn’t white. When she released me into the jail loading bay I told her I wanted to hug her. She said thanks but that was against policy. “Good luck” were her final words.

  Uniformed staff patted me down, put the contents of my pockets inside a plastic bag and checked the bag into an office. Looking at the thugs in line around me, I asked the closest officer if I could be kept with the women. The guy laughed. “They’re meaner than the men.”

  Staff shoved tens of us into a white cinder block cell without air conditioning. Three walls and one pane of glass overlooking a hall. The dense swampy air stunk of armpit and filled my throat like hot oil. Officers led people back and forth past the glass, toward some fate I could only guess. A silver metal toilet sat in one corner. White metal bunks without mattresses hung from the walls.

  I sat on the floor while people talked about their charges. “What’re you in for?” Drugs, robbery, assault. Beefy Caucasians with sleeveless shirts picked at their fingertips. Sweaty Hispanic men with bandanas over their foreheads told jokes. One told me not to worry; first time drug possession only meant staying overnight. “You’ll be in and out,” he said. I tried to look unfazed, tough and worldly, but they must’ve have sensed my alarm. Others explained how the process worked: cops would move us around to different holding cells; we’d see a judge and make a plea; then the lowball cases like mine would go home while others stayed longer awaiting sentencing. The place smelled like cigarette breath and BO.

  A payphone hung nearby. The considerate thing would have been to at least tell Kari not to wait for me, that I was okay and offer an excuse for missing the baseball game. Instead I laid face down on the dirty floor under a bunk and tried to wish away the smothering heat and these loud, rough people. I didn’t want to get into a heated discussion with my fiancé in front of these men.

  As the opiates drained from my system hour by hour, prisoners swapped stories and talked shit. One guy bragged about robbing a convenience store without a gun. “Just stuck my hand in my coat pocket,” he said, “with my finger out so it stuck like a barrel. Dumb motherfuckers.” He claimed he would’ve gotten away with it had his companion not tripped while running down an embankment.

  A cockroach scurried past my arm.

  As predicted, officers passed us cell to cell—filtering out people for what seemed different offenses—and moved us steadily closer to the court room. Lunch arrived: green bologna on soggy bread. “Fucking Sheriff Joe,” people said. I traded someone my sandwich for their orange. No way was I getting food poisoning inside a cell.

  A chatty thirty-something missing a side tooth said, “Wanna bunk together?” Bunk? I thought. I was only staying overnight. He described the jail’s upper levels, where people awaited trial and their impending transfer to prison. “There’s mattresses on the beds,” he said, “showers too.” I tried not to panic, which was hard without the palliative titty-suck force of narcotics. How bad of shape was I in?

  By the time an officer led me and the few remaining others into the nearly vacant court, it was past the middle of the night. I sat on a hard wooden bench sweating and in withdrawal. My joints ached. My calf muscles twitched. I sat as straight as possible, trying to resume a modicum of the dignity my parents had raised me with, and also hoping that decorum would earn me some mercy. Instead, when staff called my name, I stood up. The judge read my charge and asked for my plea. “Guilty,” I said and sat back down.

  Afterwards I lay in a different cell, on a mattress, where my mind jumped between thoughts, mainly the dope I had stashed at home and what I’d tell Kari. Missing all night? She must have been terrified. When they released me onto the street, the sun hadn’t risen. I called her on a payphone and reassured her that everything was alright; I’d explain when she arrived. I sat on the steps under a dark blue sky thinking over my story: I could say that her sister Diane had borrowed the Acura to drive some friends to a northern Arizona cabin. I hadn’t even heard about their trip or who went, but I knew how to use their trip to my advantage.

  Kari pulled up with Diane in the passenger seat, both in a panic. “We were so worried about you,” they said. “We called all the hospitals to see if you were in an accident.” I kissed Kari on the cheek and thanked them for rescuing me at that ungodly hour. They’d been up all night. “What happened?”

  I said I got pulled over for not using my signal. When the cop questioned whose car it was, she searched it and found a Ziploc contai
ning weed under the passenger seat, probably from Diane’s trip. “Seeds and stems,” I said. “but that’s enough in this state for a felony.”

  Diane shrieked. “Me?” She turned to face me in back, her brows furrowed and eyes wide. “No one I went with even smokes weed.”

  I told her it was okay. I wasn’t mad at her—we can’t control what our friends do—and Kari seemed to buy it. Diane stared at her as if searching for clemency, then turned back around and settled into her seat.

  It was, without a doubt, the most despicable thing I had ever done. Worse than sneaking behind Kari’s back, worse than the lies and using in the first place. Watching Diane’s slumped body deflate, the ease with which I threw her to the dogs, it was enough to make me want to cut my own wrists. With nothing to dampen the sting of my malice and virulent guilt, my whole body ached as if someone had cut them for me.

  I caught my huge black hockey puck pupils in the rearview mirror and apologized for all the worry I’d caused. The jail phones didn’t work, I said. “Your relatives must’ve thought I was the biggest jerk on earth.” No, they assured me, everyone was just confused, no one knew where I had gone. I nodded, but wanted to scream, No! I am the biggest jerk on earth! I’m a fucking mess please help me before anything else comes apart it’s so wrecked.

  After moments of chilly silence Diane turned around and said, “Aaron, I promise you. We did not have weed in the car.”

  “I’m just telling you what I know,” I said. “It’s not your fault.” Like I was the nice guy.

  We dropped Diane off and drove home. The cats rushed the door, and when Kari went to the bathroom, I went straight to the kitchen cabinet. To save time, I had recently stashed an eye-dropper full of pre-mixed heroin far back behind the spice bottles—that’s how much my intake had skyrocketed. By the time Kari returned, my muscles had loosened, my dry eyes were wet. I plopped down on the couch beside her and wrapped her in a hug.