Coming Undone

by Terri White

  I email a friend:

  ‘So here I am in New York. Here I am, alone. All alone.’

  I didn’t know then what alone truly means. It’s more than being a new arrival in a city, without familiar colleagues, without friends, without people to call your own, people who call you theirs. I will learn though.

  I’ve cut off my British phone – deliberately, so that I can’t be reached by who and what I’ve left behind. My ex-boyfriend who, just a handful of months before had told me, in an email, about his new girlfriend, their new home and then just weeks later, a follow-up about their new baby. His news had me dry-heaving and spitting into the office toilet as another woman pissed long and hard in the cubicle next to me.

  Their new family – formed just days after I arrive in the city, with their son’s birth – couldn’t reach me if I didn’t have a phone to receive pictures and updates from concerned friends who just want to check if I have seen the pictures on the internet and if I haven’t I shouldn’t, absolutely under any circumstances, go looking for them.

  For three weeks the only place I have internet or telephone access is at work and I feel protected, hardened by the isolation, the complete absence of life, or any kind of love, that I recognise.

  My birthday comes around; I turn thirty-three alone on my knees on the floor of my apartment. The splinters burrow into my scarred kneecaps as I kneel. I cry, beg, claw the walls, the floors. I’m bleeding as my hands face each other and come together.

  That first summer, I dye my hair fire-engine red. I cut my fringe into a hard, high line. I’ll soon dye it dark brown. And then I’ll dye it black. I can’t remember what I used to look like, what she used to look like just a handful of weeks before. I look at pictures from before and see the woman I was, smiling, the light almost reaching her eyes, feel her between my fingers and in my mind. Her hair is yellow and her eyes are blue and she looks happy and free and light as air and I touch her, touch her almost-happiness. It bubbles and bites. I pull back. I’m too far away now.

  I go to places with other people in them, in search of her. I look for her yellow, brittle strands, the bursting bright blue. In the places where men buy me drinks because I’m alone reading Jay McInerney. In the bar in the French restaurant half a block away where no one buys the glass after glass I drink. Before I can’t remember anything, I remember telling the soft-eyed owner about being lonely, about feeling so very sad. The record store with the two short aisles bursting with old British magazines, browning around the edges, and old records slipped into thick plastic. I feel them between fingers that shake a little now, the ends chewed and torn and the brightest pink, striped, lashed with red. I feel at home; I can touch it. The dust slips inside the small areas of exposed skin and I smear it in my broken hair and I’m here and I don’t feel like drinking or diving or dying or going somewhere else. I can see straight, briefly.

  Those seconds, those minutes, are not the seconds and minutes that make up the hours that make up my days. I wander from place to place, drink to drink, until the grey becomes black and I’m swallowed and get home God knows how and every morning when I wake up, I’m always surprised, sometimes crestfallen, to have been spat out again, tender and bruised and somehow a little less than when I was sucked up.

  But at night, it’s the coat I wear, tugged around me, that I hate taking off, refuse to. It comes with me everywhere. It becomes my skin. My blood, my hair, my teeth, my touch, my taste.

  Within weeks, I have a list of bars I’d rather not visit, some that I simply can’t from sheer embarrassment and shame. The number of blocks I have to walk to get a drink in safety, with dignity, growing alongside it. There’s too much chance of recognition, specifically things I don’t want to be recognised for.

  On the good nights, I lose things: my favourite faux fur coat, my red leather gloves, my passport, my bank card, my phone. On the bad nights, I lose more: chunks of my memory, all the feeling in my hands and toes, my loosening hold on my sanity.

  On the nights in between, I fight with the bartender about the jukebox (‘Why did you fucking skip New Order? Give me my five dollars back!’). I climb on the hood of a parked car, knees flinching, fighting against the cold, hard metal. Lying on my back, looking at the sky with drunken terror. I let a man whose face never comes into focus kiss me badly against the jukebox as The Smiths play, his hands pulling my mascara and eyeliner down my face in black stripes, tyre tracks from the hit and run. On those nights, my eyes are ringed, hollow, sunk in black; the bright red of my lipstick is smeared up to where my cheekbone hits my eye socket. My reflection is that of a stranger. A clown.

  And on the very bad nights, the worst ones, there’s mess to be cleared up the next day. A mind to be patched up, a body to be fixed, a memory to be erased, if it was ever captured in the first place. A scientist once told me that when you reach a certain level of drunkenness, your brain stops recording events. So, the next morning, what you think has been forgotten, what you desperately try to retrieve, simply isn’t there, never has been, never will be. I cling to this in the moments that I rummage for drunken memories in the wreckage of my nights, my days. They don’t exist. And in those moments, I reason, neither do I.

  I like drinking. Very much. Or rather, I like what drinking does to me. I like feeling altered. Very much. I like feeling the mundanity and misery of normality dissolve under my tongue. The anxiety that balls my fists, locks my shoulders, fixes my grin disappears. My body loosens, my mind softens, clouds drift in and the release feels like escape.

  The mornings are impossible. Every morning is impossible. The ritual cripples me. Wake up, panic, feel guilty and/or ashamed, vomit, shower, vomit (sometimes in the shower), dress, paint my face, pour drops in my eyes to dissolve away the lightning streaks and shoots of red.

  Weekends are the worst; my mornings, days, free of the commitment to be somewhere, to be somebody. I never, ever dare make any plans for a Saturday or Sunday; I know that I will likely be unconscious until the afternoon. The freedom means I drink longer, more heavily, with even more enthusiasm than usual. I wake up and vomit – the only part of my weekday routine that I carry over – before taking to the couch where I sleep, eat delivery food, vomit some more and watch TV until it’s time to do it all again. This isn’t the consequence of nights of fun and abandon: I’m usually alone – definitely by the end of the night if not at the start. I don’t need company to drink and my drinking means that many people don’t want to be in my company. Which works out well all round.

  I become obsessed with booze: when can I start drinking, what will happen when that half-full bottle is emptied, why has no one ordered another yet, can I order another drink yet? I start to sneak by the bar at any moments that present themselves – shots of liquor swallowed at gigs and restaurants when I’m on my way back from the toilet. At bars when they go out for a smoke. I deliberately don’t keep track of my drinks and really hope that no one else does either. There is no greater relief than the change of a bartender shift: the clean slate that comes with a paid bar bill and a pair of eyes that hasn’t seen your sliding disposition.

  But the more I drink, these people, wherever I am, could be my people. This could be my home. I could be anywhere. I could be comfortable. I could even be happy. At some point, I stop experiencing the night in real time. It becomes a series of memories that I’ll revisit or abandon later, carrying some with me home, allowing others to fall away, never ever to be claimed. And at some point in the night, the tape simply, suddenly, runs out.

  More and more, I squat in the room with no windows and no light that makes me want to sink and disappear inside its walls. Some days I disassociate completely – I can see the world through the glass dome that I’m suffocating inside, but I can’t touch it, feel it, taste it, suck it into my lungs. When I’ve drifted so far away from myself, I feel that my mind is lost forever, that I’ll never make it back to my body. That the loose tie holding it tight has snapped and can never be mended. Those are the wo
rst moments of all, the moments when I know my only option is through the window, my body splattering on the pavement.

  A friend mentions Xanax to me: how it soothes, blunts the edges; how everyone takes it. I go to the doctor and before I’ve even half-finished my story of half-truths (‘I feel kinda anxious, I suppose. No big deal, but something to help would be great!’), he is writing a script that says yes, I too can have Xanax. I slip the tiny pink pill, and then a second, onto my tongue. I wait. Twenty minutes later, I feel a soft wave wash over me. Thirty minutes after that, I’m not worrying about anyone, anything. I lie on the bed and watch the outline of the trees outside dance across the ceiling and down the walls. I feel … OK. A revolutionary state.

  I’m kept moving from point to point by my friends who come to visit, each one sustaining me until the next. Dave is coming to town for the US release of his book. I’ve offered to let him stay with me, but the reality of what that looks like looms large. I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping the reality of my New York life from everyone at home so far. But however good an act I put on, he’d see the reality. Of me, of where I live. The huge gap between what I am and what I claim to be. He is due to step right slap bang into the middle of it, looking at me in surprise as the water rises past his knees.

  He’s sleeping on my sofa – brown, dusty – facing the old grey television, dark kitchen to his left, my bed and the only sources of light to his right. I can tell when he arrives that this isn’t what he expects, what anyone expects. I make a joke about the lack of windows, the burnt orange walls that always make it look like it’s being frozen in time while being burned down from the inside out.

  Night one: I join him in the bar where he’s reading an excerpt from his book. I make myself a promise: two drinks, no more. I’ll stay sober; I’ll stay sane, no matter what. I know no one at the bar, bury my head in my phone, back against the wall. Dave steps up to read under two white, bright lights – charming, funny, already so much more at home in my town within twenty-four hours than I am. Outside the window, they’re projecting his face reading, the slight lisp and his British song captivating the whole room of cool, hot, also charming, also funny locals. Some are wearing hats. There’s a photographer kneeling just metres away from his knees, capturing this moment. His face hovers twenty feet to my left out of the window. I stay long enough to be polite, until he’s finished, then abandon my second drink with half a finger left in the glass and leave. In the cab, I cry. Partly from joy and pride for him. Partly because the thick loneliness has doubled in size. He’s been embraced by the city as I stand on the outside, palms against the glass.

  The second night: his launch party. Drinks at an apartment in Chelsea owned by another author from his publisher. I know that this will be harder. The opportunities to stand alone, fade into the shadows on the walls, are fewer. I’m buzzed in and stand in the stairwell, paralysed with anxiety, before heading up to the front door. I take two Xanax and then decide to take a third to be on the safe side. The last one tastes bitter as it gets stuck under my tongue.

  The fellow author opens the door and I recognise him. He’s a local in the bar downstairs, the bar that I go to a lot, alone. I mentally scan, as quickly as possible, the Rolodex of evenings flashing through my mind. What has he seen? What have I done? A brief flash of something – recognition, horror, confusion, Christ knows – flashes across his face, a brief look up and down, before he straightens it out, the impeccable host, and welcomes me inside, with the half sweep of a hand (it was a Manhattan apartment, after all).

  Inside, over and around him, there are floating heads, perfectly round. The room is about a third full of small people, all dressed in black and brown, a statistically impossible amount in glasses. They’re talking in three tiny, tight pockets, cradling small drinks on white paper napkins that are perfectly square. I look from one to the other, feeling naked.

  I spot Dave with relief.

  ‘Terri’s come as a cartoon character,’ he says. The group pauses. One laughs, one swallows drily, one looks away, another coughs.

  I laugh – ‘You know me!’ – and smooth down my creased dress that I haven’t had time to iron. I can see how I look, what they must see. My broken hair, pinned high and tight. Scarlet slash of a mouth. Tight reproduction 1950s wiggle dress – blue with white trim. Cherry-red stilettos are cutting the feet that curl up inside them.

  I walk to the kitchen and help myself to a drink. I drink it fast; there’s another. I do what feels like the most unnatural act in the world and walk into an almost closed circle of people already talking. They warily make a few inches for me to stand in and continue talking while I nod, one hand holding another drink, the other gripping the forearm with all my might to keep me present, to stop me smashing up everything around me while I scream.

  I see the alternative events unloading in my mind as I nod, smile, make uh-huh noises. Eventually, manners kick in. They ask me what I do. There’s an eye roll at the word ‘journalism’. Oh, those magazines, they say, eyebrows raised, foreheads tight.

  A mutual friend and his wife arrive, and I take solace with them and the bottle of tequila which someone might have bought or someone might have just found. I remember a shot, two shots and then black.

  I wake, fully dressed, on top of my sheets. I roll my tongue over inside my teeth, which are sticky. I can taste, feel, sick. I roll over on my back, grab my phone, see with relief that I’m not late for work, but then I’m hit with instant panic as I realise, know, that Dave isn’t there. I look over at the sofa to be sure and it’s empty, blanket folded up on top of the single pillow. There’s a brick in my chest. I can’t remember, but I know something bad happened. I did something bad.

  The thing about blackouts is that, more often than not, the memory is gone forever. I spend years and years trying to retrieve them, to fish them out with a hook from the tightest crevices and recesses of my mind. The memory, the exact words and shapes and acts may not be there – what I did with my mouth, my hands, my feet, my legs – but the knowledge that I’d done something, something bad, is always with me. The bit of my brain that decided not to record the memory isn’t going to let me off the hook that easily. I carry the stink of shame and embarrassment and panic around with me until I see the place or the person I picked it up.

  I call Dave. He answers.

  ‘Where are you?’ I ask.

  ‘Do you not remember?’

  ‘No.’

  He tells me, matter-of-factly, that I ruined his party. That I got drunk, shouted, I might have cried. That I’d fled and told him he couldn’t stay at mine. He’d had to find somewhere else to sleep and is currently in Brooklyn.

  Everything gets very still as he talks. I notice dust, the air carrying bits of my skin past me as I stare out of the window. I want to jump through it.

  He meets me after work in an Indian restaurant in the Village. I barely taste my food as I apologise over and over, and though he says the right words with considerable grace, he can’t meet my eyes. I’ve never felt more ashamed, hated myself more. The bodies continue to pile up.

  CHAPTER 16

  It’s October when warning comes of the impending Hurricane Sandy – the post-tropical cyclone which will go on to cause the deaths of seventy-one people in America. I have no idea what I’m about to experience or how to prepare for it. I think of soft British winds and scattered showers, and I go to the bodega on the corner and buy supplies: crisps, biscuits, two apples, cakes and two candles. I don’t buy booze I never allow myself to drink at home – a decision I will come to regret. We’re sent home early from work just before it’s declared unsafe to travel.

  I make it home as the wind starts howling with a roar and the rain pounds down. I sit watching events unfold on television, idly flicking between all of the channels showing the same thing. Then: nothing. No noise, no light. The electricity goes out and my apartment is plunged into silent darkness. I start texting friends back in the UK, but a few minutes later, the bars o
n my cell phone disappear and service goes completely. I go to the toilet and flush, but no water rushes up and out. I try the sink: there’s just the squeaking of the taps against the dry spout.

  I realise I have no phone reception, no access to email or the internet and no TV. I have no choice but to wait it out, alone, in darkness, as the storm rages on and on outside. For how long, I have no clue. I burn through my two candles in hours, ration out the meagre food. I lie on the bed, in total darkness, the trees outside hurtling towards my windows, never following through on their threat. I make no effort to roll out of their way, just in case the worst happens. The streets outside are empty, pitch-black. The wind picks up papers, trash and takes them careering through the air. I watch them as they dance. I have no clue, at any point, what time it is. With little to do but sleep, I wake not knowing if it’s a new day or still the same one, what’s dawn and what’s sunset.

  I hear what I think are voices, chanting, chanting, chanting. Or are they thoughts? I hear them in my dreams and when I’m awake, when the wind blows and the windows rattle and when it’s perfectly still. I see shadows curl up and crawl the walls, their body blending with mine on the ceiling.

  On what I think is the fourth day, the wind has stopped and I decide to venture outside, hoping it’s safe. I feel my way down the stairs of my building in complete darkness, the electricity still off. As I open the door to my building and step outside, I’m relieved to see handfuls of people wandering outside, though they looked dazed, confused.

  A few of the local stores are selling their remaining stock for cash only, but I have none and the ATMs are down. Everything else is closed – the bars, the restaurants, the liquor stores – and trees and power lines lie crumpled and broken in the streets.

  I hear one of the people wandering around aimlessly like me say that there is electricity and cell signal uptown, so I start to walk. And when I hit 34th Street, there it is – half of the city lit up like it’s Christmas. My phone springs back to life – amongst the concerned messages, one from a friend from London who is in town.