Heat and Light (16 page)

“You never seen anything like it,” Kip tells Dar later. They are sitting in the engineers' room, a cramped closet thirty-six floors above the sidewalks of downtown, its walls plastered with topo maps slightly faded by the sun. Dar spends most of his time here, preferring it to his own office, a gleaming corner suite with impressive
views on both sides. The clutter comforts him, the piles of paper, the engineers' half-empty coffee cups. It calls to mind the rented space above a warehouse where a much younger Darby Butters hung out his shingle. The new company was his entirely, and in the local fashion he named it after himself.

“I don't care if they
are
Ayrabs. I don't believe in burning anybody's flag.” Dar drums his fat fingers on the desk, a sign he's getting antsy. He is a squat homely man with the jowly underbite of an English bulldog, bald as a snow globe, and rich enough that it doesn't matter, which entirely explains his marriage to Kip's mother.

Darco was as good a name as any. The alternative, Buttco, was not a viable option.

“A course they did spit in our eye,” says Dar, “and Carter let them.”

Kip is barely listening. He scans the engineers' shelves for an atlas. The point of dynamism is eight time zones away, in a country he really should locate on a map. In the streets of Houston the horns are still honking.

“Then again,” Dar adds, stating the obvious. “It's good for bidness.”

T
he press attaché wears a striped dress shirt, a rim of undershirt visible beneath it. Imagine him dressing for work four days ago, fortified by coffee, slipping the shirt off its hanger, and running through his to-do list, the memos and meetings and phone calls, the ordinary day.

Now he is brought out before the cameras, still wearing the shirt. Two of his captors—scruffy young men, students presumably—hold his elbows. Inside the American embassy his colleagues are still alive. Blindfolded, he feels the crowd gathering, its anger swelling like a weather system, raining insults in Farsi and English.

On Taleghani Street, business is booming. Vendors hawk caps and sweatshirts, bottled water and boiled sugar beets. From a wheeled cart, a boy and his father sell videotapes of Sunday's invasion, the mob of students scaling the embassy wall.

In the States it is still yesterday. The press attaché is watched from sectional sofas, from BarcaLoungers, the living rooms of deep America: shag carpet and track lighting, hi-fis, tropical fish in tanks. In Manhattan and the outer boroughs, his name is repeated wonderingly.
Barry Rosen.
The name says grandson and nephew, lavished with tutors and orthodontia and lovingly bar mitzvahed, a family's hope. There is concern for his parents, the poor Rosens no longer kvelling.
(My son the diplomat. In the State Department, can you imagine?)
It makes you stop and think. It makes you grateful for your own underachieving offspring, the assistant managers. The
lazy boy and timid girl rapidly aging, still working retail. You think of the poor Rosens, and give thanks.

An outrageous act, a shocking violation. The press attaché does not speak. He is displayed like a well-behaved child, the mannerly boy he once was. Barry Rosen is seen and not heard, escorted off, stage left.

AN OUTRAGEOUS ACT,
but
not without precedent. Nine months ago—Valentine's Day, at the very same embassy—a secretary filled a glass dish with candy hearts. An hour later the embassy was attacked, the ambassador held hostage.

BE MINE. SWEET ON YOU.

Panic at the State Department, a flurry of briefings. At the Pentagon men conferred behind closed doors. By evening, to everyone's surprise, the ambassador was released. Washington slept deeply, rose early, and made prudent adjustments: the ambassador recalled to Washington, the embassy staff in Teheran cut to a skeleton crew of sixty. The front windows of the building were replaced with bulletproof glass.

Nine months later, the bulletproof glass is useless. An angry crowd engulfs the embassy. A girl cuts the chains at the gate on Taleghani Street, with metal cutters stashed beneath her chador.

Like a parade of worker ants, students pour over the wall.

Night after night America watches from its couches. All three networks run the same footage, the Imam's face reproduced on fifty-foot banners, his beard and turban, his fierce black brow. Immense crowds cheer him: Super Bowl–size, ominously foreign. Bearded men, women swathed in fabric. Some carry homemade placards, in that diabolical curling cursive no one can read.

The U.N. Security Council calls a closed session.

In Teheran the Imam makes an announcement: the hostages' fate will be decided by the Iranian Parliament.

The Iranian Parliament is not yet elected.

In Oregon and California and Michigan and Ohio, Muslim students hold protests.
SEND HIM BACK! THE SHAH MUST STAND TRIAL.
In Minnesota they are hit with snowballs. In Massachusetts they are pelted with rocks. A Cleveland sportscaster sets fire, on camera, to a red-white-and-green flag. The station gets six hundred calls from viewers. Only one is a complaint.

In New York a champion boxer holds a press conference. A famous Muslim, he offers himself in exchange for the hostages.

All three networks cover the press conference. A boy in Pennsylvania is barely listening. He rolls the die and moves the mouse around the board.

T
here's a new hire at Wellways. Darren Devlin knows this by the smell of his shit. In the staff restroom, on three consecutive mornings, three similar-smelling bowel movements have occurred. This is no trick of bad sushi or Mexican food, no stomach virus. There can be no doubt: a new shitter has joined the team.

It is an addict's superpower, this awareness of shit, not extrasensory perception but its opposite, deeply sensory, an animal intuition. An aptitude modern plumbing has rendered obsolete; a vestigial sixth sense humans have, for the most part, evolved beyond. The opiate addict being a special category of human.

For many years, in the depths of Darren's own addiction, shitting was a memory so faint, so distant, it might have come from a past life. He'd gone months or possibly years without ever sitting on a toilet—a claim few in the developed world could make, opiate addicts excepted. His morning Group has proven, definitively, that it is impossible to die of constipation. If it were possible, Darren and most of his clients would already be dead.

In detox, of course, the reverse happened: a tsunami of diarrhea, two or five or ten years' worth of impacted fecal matter released with unspeakable urgency, a notable (but by no means the only) bodily humiliation of heroin withdrawal. Kicking for the last time, Darren had been astonished by its volume. Where did it come from? For years he had scarcely eaten. His daily rations—sugary,
insubstantial—came from convenience stores: Popsicles and lemonade, candy bars and shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies Treats.

Not long ago, he came across the intake papers from his first stay at Wellways. Height, five feet eleven inches. Weight, 130 pounds.

His morning Group is generous with such stories—its bodily debacles, its sicknesses. Only the newcomers are reticent, not yet understanding that public debasement is the coin of the realm.

He is on his way to morning Group when Patricia, the director, stops him in the hallway. “I've been looking all over for you.” Her hand lingers on his shoulder. She is a sturdy little woman, fifty-something, with forearms like an army mess sergeant. Like all women who flirt with him, she is old enough to be his mother. “We have a problem. It's about your vacation.”

“I haven't taken any vacation.”

“That's the problem. Are you aware that in four years you have taken not one single vacation day?”

“I wasn't,” he says. “Aware.”

“At the moment, we owe you eight weeks of paid vacation. Reliance is requiring that you take it before your anniversary date. Which is August twentieth.”

Requiring?

“What happens if I don't take it?”

“Mandatory furlough.”

“Wait,
what
?” The word conjures up images of wartime: soldiers in gray homespun, riding home to sweethearts a week before Gettysburg. A tender interlude, then death by bayonet.

“Sweetie, it's simple. You need to take eight weeks' paid vacation. Or, if you prefer, eight weeks' unpaid. That part is up to you.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Correct.” Patricia gives her happy zombie look—glassy eyes, a terrifying frozen smile. Last winter Wellways was acquired by Reliance Healthcare, an immense multinational that runs clinics and small hospitals in twenty states and the District of Columbia.
Since then new policies have been implemented, outlined in Patricia's weekly memos, which go straight into Darren's recycling bin. When forced to speak of the new initiatives, Patricia refrains from comment. Her exasperation is conveyed by the happy zombie look.

“You can take your eight weeks all at once, or in increments. Your paycheck will be direct-deposited every other Friday on the usual schedule. Unless you opt for the furlough. In which case nothing will be deposited.” Again the zombie smile.

He stares at her dumbfounded. “What you're saying is I can't come to work.”

“That's what I'm saying.”

“But who will take my groups? The new guy?”

“How did you know there was a new guy?”

He does not answer this question.

“Have fun, Darren. Get some sun or something.” A playful punch on his shoulder. “Live a little, why don't you?”

He smiles weakly, though his shoulder is smarting. For a small woman Patricia packs a wallop.

“I'M DARREN, THE HEAD COUNSELOR ON THIS UNIT.
And I'm an addict.”

Twenty men answer in unison, like gravelly voiced first-graders: “Hi, Darren.” The youngest, a skateboard kid from Catonsville, is fifteen. The oldest, a Catholic priest hooked on Vicodin, is seventy-four.

He begins by welcoming two new clients. Tony is a wizened grandfather, Latino or Italian. Alvin resembles a retired NBA player, a large, sad-eyed black man with a shiny bald head. Unusually, both are alcoholics. Intake rarely sends him the drinkers. Mainly he gets what the medical director deems the hard cases—which, in Baltimore, means opiates. Of the counselors, only Darren is a graduate of the program, which is believed to give him cred with the clients.

That he graduated twice is never mentioned.

He invites the new guys to tell their stories. Alvin requires some prodding. Tony, a more typical alcoholic, poses the opposite problem; there is simply no shutting him up. Given the choice, Darren would take a junkie any day, though he knows better than to express a preference. At Wellways it is a point of doctrine, incontrovertible: addicts are more alike than different. The same modalities (individual cognitive/behavioral counseling, Twelve Step group work, medical intervention where appropriate) are effective for all.

Like everything else in rehab, the stories are interminable. The men can barely stay awake. The skateboard kid looks catatonic. The priest's lips move silently.

Interminable.

When you quit drugs, you learn how long a day is. For years Darren had lived outside time, his days crowded with purposeful activity: scrounging for money, copping, shooting. Slipping, when all was finished, into that blessed state where time had no meaning at all. By comparison, sober days were cavernous. Six years later, they still are.

He filled them, at first, with meetings, two and sometimes three a day, anything to avoid his empty apartment, linked forever in his mind to the old life's squalid pleasures. The apartment in Charles Village, a few blocks from the Hopkins campus, where his seduction had occurred and occurred and occurred, the whole demented carnival of craving and rapture and despair.

What did people do all day, if they didn't do drugs?

Sobriety was effortless—meaningless, too—if you'd never been high.

Early in his recovery, he'd found projects. It was as though he'd awakened from a long nap, blinking and disoriented, and found himself in a dilapidated shack: the windows broken, the roof leaking, the walls crumbling. It was figuratively true, if not literally (though his housekeeping had, in fact, deteriorated). His disease had left his life in ruins, the adult life that had started without him noticing.
Unmedicated, he faced the smoldering wreckage of his academic career, his credit rating, his health. The people he'd avoided, lied to, stolen from, betrayed. The roommate he'd bailed on, a girl who loved him. His academic adviser. His lab partner. His dad.

He hadn't been sober since the ninth grade, an age at which sobriety wasn't a choice but, like virginity, a state you were cursed with. Darren at fourteen: a skinny dork hooked on chess and crosswords and, incongruously, the music of Public Enemy. In his lily-white hometown, rap music was automatically suspect, embraced only by a few shameless posers. Darren listened covertly, under headphones, and felt defibrillated. The driving beats, the fierce lyrics, were the testosterone shot his young self badly needed. He felt, fleetingly but powerfully, like a man.

Half of sobriety was wishing you'd never started: if you'd never taken that first drink, first bump, you could have stayed clean forever with no sweat at all. Instead, it became your life's work. Six years in, Darren is gravely aware of what recovery has cost him: his own time and other people's money, the nearly superhuman effort. The crushing, virtually incalculable cost of getting well.

He could have cured cancer by now, if he'd never gotten high.

Newly sober, he embarked on a massive salvage operation. A new apartment, night classes at the community college (a humbling experience, when you'd blown a golden ticket at Johns Hopkins). He worked a lunch counter at the Baltimore Convention Center, as many shifts as they'd give him, selling overpriced sandwiches to salesmen from Cleveland or Wichita. He gave up red meat, he gave up all meat. Paid his old parking tickets, opened a bank account, saw a dentist. Swallowed vitamins and joined a gym. On Sundays he called his father, who'd subsidized his treatment. Who'd believed despite overwhelming evidence that Darren would someday get clean.

Tony is winding up for his grand finale. “Eighty-three years old. She's in a walker, okay? She call that county van for the dis
abled, they come and get her. That's how bad she want to leave me.”

Eight weeks of paid vacation. Eight weeks is fifty-six days.

The other half of sobriety was wishing you'd never stopped. The job at Wellways meets Darren's one overarching need: it expands to fill the space available. He can spend the day at the clinic and then, if he is bored or lonely, drop in at night or on weekends. He's been called—by coworkers, by Patricia herself—a workaholic, an idea he finds ludicrous. They're addictions counselors: Can't they see his behavior for what it is? The addict replacing one substance with another, desperate to fill the day.

He gave up meat because what was meat to him?

Of course he's never taken a vacation. Why would he? Why would anyone, with no heroin to shoot?

“Sixty years of marriage,” says Tony. “I guess she finally had enough.”

How else could a person fill fifty-six empty days? Six years since his last fix, Darren can imagine no other way.

HE LEAVES BALTIMORE
on Friday afternoon, joining the slow parade of refugees fleeing the city for the summer weekend, Route 70 backed up all the way to Fredneck. Beside him, on the passenger seat, are his laptop, duffel bag, and
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous,
its plain black cover faded and worn. At the Pennsylvania border he peels off the highway. The day is clear and bright, the view transporting. A rainy spring had worked its magic, turning the valley lush and green.
I'm overdue for a visit,
he'd told his father, a laughable understatement. He hasn't set foot in Bakerton in years.

And yet the route is deeply familiar, the tollbooths and truck stops, potholes in all the old places. The sameness of everything allows him to pretend, briefly, that no time has passed. That it's still thirteen years ago, his first-ever trip to Hopkins: sprawled in the backseat of his parents' Crown Vic, his few possessions (the chess
set, the Public Enemy CDs) piled in milk crates beside him, his water pipe and rolling papers hidden in a duffel bag. Eighteen years old and thoroughly stoned, the only way he could imagine spending three hours in the car with his parents.

Now he'd give a year of his life—more—to be back in that car.

His mother still living, his own addiction still in front of him. Time, still, to circumvent it. To take another road.

The rest stops and Cracker Barrels, the bright signage advertising gasoline and fast food, outlet shopping, Amish quilts. The sameness isn't merely unsettling. In some way that makes no sense, it offends him personally. He feels affronted by the world's denial, its stubborn refusal to acknowledge all that has been broken, snuffed out, wasted, lost. And so, when he spots two unfamiliar billboards at the crest of a hill, on either side of Drake Highway, he feels compelled to stop and examine them, concrete evidence—at last—that time has passed.

He puts on his hazards and gets out of the car. The billboards are identically sized. One shows a pastoral scene, a grassy meadow. Emblazoned across it is a boldfaced slogan:
CLEAN ENERGY FOR AMERICA'S FUTURE
. At the center of the meadow stands an unobtrusive metal canister, man-size, painted dark green.

Across the road, the other billboard shows a swarthy man's face the size of a trampoline. He looks down on motorists with an expression of infinite sadness, as though they have disappointed him profoundly.
A FRACKING NIGHTMARE? CALL PAUL ZACHARIAS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.

He gets back into his car.

Fracking.
The word sounds subliminally obscene, a genteel euphemism for
fucking
. Darren remembers, vaguely, a Public Radio segment he once heard on the way to work. Fracking contaminated the water supply, or caused earthquakes or possibly cancer. Did it also kill wildlife? Dick Cheney, somehow, was to blame.

How distant the world has grown, its problems secondary,
always, to his own dysfunction. His entire attention absorbed, forever, by the not-using of drugs.

His old fuel stop is a Sheetz convenience store on the outskirts of Bakerton, the cheapest gas for miles. His tiny tank can be filled for pocket change. The parking lot is crowded, cars and pickups and, off to the side, two huge trucks idling at the diesel pump. Darren pulls up to the pump and goes inside to pay, nearly knocking over a display of bottle openers stamped with the Pittsburgh Steelers logo. Scotch-taped to the cash register is a hand-lettered sign:
SUDAFED LIMIT 2 PER CUSTOMER NO EXCEPTIONS.

Behind the counter, in red Sheetz smocks, stand a man and a woman he vaguely recognizes—
MARTY
and
ALYSSA
, according to their name tags. Either or both might have been his classmates, though to Darren they look middle-aged. Like everybody in town, they're probably younger than they look.

Alyssa stares out the window. “What kind of a car is that?”

“A smart car.”

Marty guffaws. “Where's the rest of it?”