Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (16 page)

With a single stroke!
Straw had said, and he’d chopped the air in front of him. What could that mean?

Well, in a week he would find out; he would be brought in on the Core Vision Department or New Alexandria or whatever. Most likely, it would turn out to be some vain and boondoggly tycoon project. Even Straw’s worst ideas had full-time staffs. Straw was an art collector, a philanthropist, a professional nemesis to tax collectors all over the world. (“I don’t have any money, Mark,” he said once in a session when Mark had accidentally mentioned that Straw had a lot of money. “Money only passes through me.”)

Leaving the pub, Mark misjudged his drunkenness and knocked into a pair of men smoking near the door. “Sorry,” he said. Which wasn’t enough for one of the men, who looked him up and down, judged him no threat, and said, “I’ll crack your head, you nancy Yank shite.” The accent was broad, and the man was smiling in a dangerous way when he said it, so Mark didn’t understand at first. As the man leaned in closer, Mark saw a scar on his face that must have reduced his investment in it. His friend made to restrain him. “Best move on now,” said the friend to Mark, “he’s had a few.”

So Mark moved on, quickly. It was probably a little routine of theirs, just a couple of poseur bullies, but it still dumped a bucket of fear down his spinal cord, and on the heels of that, a shame at his physical cowardice.
Nancy
meant “fag,” right? How he wished he were with his long-ago friend Wallace, a bear-size homo from Wyoming and Harvard who spoke of dick-sucking in a farm-boy drawl and took pleasure in the lead-up to the barroom fights he got into and won every time.

How had the guy known Mark could be intimidated? Was it the vibrating chord of his cowardice? Charm and wiles were all Mark had; those were no good in close-quarters combat.

Once, long ago, when he was a boy playing Matchbox cars at a friend’s house, he heard the friend’s construction-foreman father call his dad “that ankle-grabber.” The friend’s mother said, “Hank, please!,” in a way that Mark knew even then meant the accusation was more than idle. It had needled him ever since.

Mark was nearing the shawarma place with the attached off-license. But it was closed already. So he stopped into the pub with the doors black as polished boots. He wasn’t drunk enough to sleep. And this was the bar where he’d met the guy who gave him the number of the guy who delivered drugs by bicycle. He had a pint at the bar, and then he texted the number, using the little code the guy had written on the back of the card.
Sardines
was cannabis.
Herring
was coke.
Salmon
was salt heroin. Mark had no need of herring—the Ritalin was better anyway—and despite his tough act, he was a little afraid of salmon. He ordered sardines. Twenty-one grams, because this book wasn’t gonna write itself.

The walk home proved more challenging than he had anticipated. Navigational issues. That should be one of the Ten Steps to Committed Living: Take Careful Note of Route from Pub to Home. He wandered for an hour, deeply lost, probably within a quarter mile of where he was trying to be. There was Sheepshead Lane and there was Mince Pie Close, but where the fuck was his street? At one point, he found himself behind what seemed to be a Roman avenue of auto garages: impact wrenches whizzed and whined in the moonless night; fluorescent light spilled from half-open shop doors, wooden, eight feet tall. From one, men shouted in a language Mark hadn’t the foggiest of. Then, later, he dead-ended at a canal and leaned over to get a better look at what was bobbing beside an oil drum in a yellow-foamed eddy on the greasy surface of the canal.

Ah. A bloated pit bull, its eyes a-bug, its swollen tongue distended.

Other men might panic. About the swollen pit bull staring at him with crazed eyes from a greasy vortex, or about the fact that he had been tripped up by vanity and then by greed. But Mark panicked about neither. He backtracked to the last recognizable point, made an executive decision, and then vectored through a smaller grid of streets and lanes. There, at the end of one, was his.

Steps One through Ten were and always would be: Never Give Up.

And then ten seconds spent on the doorstep of the flat searching his pockets for keys, a crystal-clear image in his head of the three-key ring reclining on the bar top of that last pub.

But then,
hosanna!
there they were, in the Slydini pocket that his tailor had engineered into the brown suit jacket. Interior. Lower left side. Three by four, with a horizontal flap. The keys dropped into his palm.

He unlocked, and locked behind him. But the stairwell light would not come on. Mark found his lighter and ascended the steep steps like an Egyptologist, the wan flicker of the weak Bic, his left hand feeling the rough brick and stone of the stairwell walls.

He had seen her once. His stillborn sister. His mom was holding her, and his dad was holding his mom. His dad had parked him in a plastic chair in the hospital hallway and told him to wait. But he heard a sob from his mother, and love trumped fear and he ducked into the room. In his memory, his dad was wearing a hat. Was it a trilby? A fedora? Seemed unlikely. His dad did indeed wear such hats, but surely not under those circumstances?

The baby was dry and lilac and still and had died before she was born. His dad was about to send him out again, but his mom said,
No, let him stay
. So he held her tiny hand for a moment, his mom’s hand enclosing theirs both. Someone once asked him if he had ever seen a ghost. He’d said no but he could have said yes.

A
fter his interview with the doctor, Leo was moved from the intake single to a more spartan, shared room in the men’s wing. It looked like a room in a small, mid-price-range motel. Taupe carpet and wood laminate.

Leo’s roommate was a goateed man in the drifts of his forties who looked like a melancholic devil and carried without comment the incredible name of James Dean. He did not clutter the air with clatter about which dresser was his and here’s how the shower works or any of that. That first evening, Leo stayed in their little room and James stayed out of Leo’s way. Leo skipped dinner out of embarrassment—he wasn’t ready to explain to anyone what he was doing here. He thought he would be gone by the end of the weekend anyway. James came back from dinner with a glob of rice pudding in a plastic clamshell and gave it to Leo like a prom corsage.

“The rice pudding’s good here,” he said.

At nine thirty, when reading or journaling was recommended, James read from a worn paperback about the Stoics. From its cover, the alabaster bust of some stern beardo stared pupil-lessly. At ten o’clock, the onion-looking counselor walked down the long corridor of the men’s wing, rapping once on each door or door frame. James didn’t budge, so neither did Leo; he made no move for the light switch or the door.

“Curfew!” said the Onion on his return trip up the corridor. He stepped just over the threshold of their room, like a big shot.

“Yeah. Just one minute, Gene,” said James, “this is a great paragraph right here.” The Onion made a show of waiting impatiently while James did a fair impression of being just
fascinated
by a paragraph. Then the Onion went to switch off the light and James quickly held up an index finger without taking eye from page. The gesture made the Onion pause, after which he realized that he had paused, which pissed him off, which made him snap the light off. “Those are false idols, James. False idols,” said the Onion as he closed the door in a too-swift way that made it clear James had won that skirmish.

Leo assumed the show was at least partly for him, and he was gratified. The one summer he was sent to camp—fourteen—his bunkmate turned out to be an overweight emotional bully who played the French horn and masturbated ceaselessly. In these situations, a good bunkmate helped a lot.

“Gene’s a big Christian,” said James from the shadow of the other side of the room. “Very easy to needle, I think you’ll find.” Moonlight came through the window, fell on the pine veneer and the taupe carpeting. Leo noticed the strange viscosity of the institutional bedding. “The good doctor is also a Christian, I think. Though if so, he is a sly one, and difficult to needle.”

The
I think you’ll find
part was as good a welcome to this place as Leo had yet received. It planted a seed in Leo, that maybe he might choose to stay here.

He was nowhere near sleep. The fluidity of his last thirty hours, the uncertainty of the next thirty, at least made this an exciting turn in what he now saw was his poorly led and dim-prospected life. He wanted to stick around to find out whether talking his way
into
rehab would turn out to be a good idea or just a brief detour in a longer descent.

James must have sensed that Leo, though silent, was miles from sleep, because he started talking. Just started telling his story in a nice baritone voice. It was like a rehab lullaby; a country ballad with no music.

He was a criminal defense attorney from Vancouver, Washington. He had fended off a DUI three months back. Now, concurrent complaints about him by his ex-wife, his business partner, his girlfriend, his parents, and the state’s attorney had made his appearance at Quivering Pines the best of a very limited range of options. He copped to the charges immediately. More or less. That is, he admitted up-front that he couldn’t seem to stop smoking crack cocaine, that he regularly lost his car, that his legal career was in tatters. And while he objected to the creepiness of the word, he conceded that he had technically, legally,
stalked
his girlfriend. “But I love her,” he said. “I love terrible things.” He allowed that his ex-wife could fairly be called saintly and long-suffering for putting up with his shit. But he said she was also a vindictive harpy ball squeezer who could drain the joy from a Ferris wheel. Their five-year-old son, Caleb, had been lately wreaking havoc and throwing all the antisocial he could at the Vancouver public-school system.

But the business partner was a scheming little prick and should not be credited. On that point, James was crystal clear. The two men owned a sports tavern on a busy stretch of state highway. James owned 55 percent.

“It’s called Aces. Pretty grim. Lots of cardboard cutouts and hangy-down advertisements. But, you know, ten grand cash, easy, on the big nights.”

James was barred from the premises of his own tavern. “All I need to do is have a drink in there every night, just to remind the staff that I’m a real person. That dickbag has turned them all against me. I could’ve drunk Sprite. I mean, I couldn’t have. But, you know. Judge was ready to include the workplace exemption in the DUI adjudication when Dickbag gets me barred. Submits an affidavit, says staff may feel
compromised
by me. Whatever that means. And if you’re working at Aces, you’re pretty compromised already, to be frank. I just wonder which one of my enemies told that moron what an affidavit is. I think he may be making a play for my ex-wife. You believe that?”

Leo decided right then that he was deeply in James’s corner on this; Dickbag was definitely a bad guy, and pretty much Leo’s enemy also. In the dark, from his pillow, unseeable, Leo made a face that meant all this.

“So I’m having some trouble taking on board the forgiveness stuff that they’re saying is in some totally undemonstrable way necessary to stay sober. Right now I see two reasons to stay alive, sober or not: to help my boy out of this patch and to take a gun down to Aces and shoot Dickbag in the face.”

“Ah. Don’t do that, now,” said Leo, his voice raspy from underuse. “Seems self-endangering to the point of suicide. And if not death, then prison, right? Or would you escape after shooting Dickbag? No. You can’t leave your son alone in the world. I mean, you will one day, I guess. But not yet you shouldn’t.” He thought that sounded bossy though, and he wanted to let James know that he was speaking from experience. “I know,” he said. “I am an orphan.”

Leo wondered whether the word was justified. He had never dropped it like that before. He was twenty-two when it happened: the fire, his escape, his parents’ non-escape.

An extra beat of silence in the blue room while James absorbed that. “Yeah, I know. I can’t leave Caleb,” he said, and sighed, and said
fuck
while he sighed, and the sadness in the sigh gave the dull cuss real weight. “My boy may have a worse brain than I do, but he has a better heart. I should forget about Dickbag; let him rob me of that whole toxic joint. Bankruptcy’s low down on my list of problems right now. I know what I’m
supposed
to do. But I just can’t seem to quit devising ways of making that man suffer. I tried to say could I use that as my Higher Power—my obsessive sense of vengeance against this one guy.”

“They said no, right?”

“They said no,” said James. “I think I want to use Zeno of Citium. ‘The passionate emotions are the result of errors in judgment.’ That’s Zeno. Yep, once I get rid of those passionate emotions, the errors in judgment will just fall away.”

Was that wry? Leo had always wondered about
wry
. Whatever it was, it was comforting to hear about this man’s bus accident of a midlife. Compared to James’s, Leo’s situation didn’t seem all that bad. Okay, he was a fragile-minded, careerless, privileged loser. Okay, he was alcoholically inclined and overfond of pot. And okay, so he’d let his imagination run too wild; he’d seen patterns and meaning where really there was only the ordinary world, drab and difficult for every poor sinner. He was embarrassed, deeply embarrassed. But embarrassed was related to humbled, wasn’t it? And humbled was said to be a good thing.

So he was actually a little cheered as he lay in the dark. Crack cocaine? Girlfriend-stalking? Bankruptcy? He saw that he had stopped well shy of the true cliff edges.

In the morning, before breakfast, Leo followed James to the lounge-like area in the middle of the men’s wing. James explained that every morning a new man led his co-recoverers on a guided meditation. It was on the chore wheel in the lounge: Snack, Library, Kitchen, Meditation, Sweep Patio. Men’s names beside these duties. Leo’s wasn’t up there yet.

Men sat in chairs and on the floor. “You’re just not allowed to lie down,” said James. A few men were pushing the edge of that rule, slumped in near-sleep in the corners of couches. Most men kept their eyes closed. One show-off sat in full lotus. The meditation was led by a man in loafers and feathered hair. He took his job seriously, making his voice all Garrison Keillor-y as he drew with words a sylvan path along a quiet shore. “The water laps at the mucky shore, the pine boughs wave gently in the morning breeze,” he said. But after a few minutes of that, he depleted his stock of relaxing imagery, so he brought the men out of a stand of pine to a clearing of shore, where they found a bass boat, “an Allison XB-Twenty-One Bassport Pro Two and Two,” said the man. “With a hydraulic jackplate, Garmin GPS in the dash, two chargers, a Livewell pump-out, tip-up consoles, a swing trailer tongue, LED lights, disc brakes, oil-bath hubs, a Minn Kota Pro-Eighty trolling motor, and dual-rod storage racks.” Gamely, Leo tried to imagine this craft.

After the bass-boat meditation, Leo tagged along with James to the smoking station, a pedestal ashtray set the state-mandated thirty feet away from the main facility. Next to the ashtray was a concrete pillar, six feet high with a dirty metal circle near its top, its function a complete mystery to Leo. Security camera? Cyclopean statue?

James put an effeminately slim menthol cigarette in his mouth, then reached a hand around the rear of the pillar and pushed a button. In seconds, the dirty metal circle glowed bright orange. James leaned his cigarette into the glowing hole.

It was an electric cigarette lighter, like the kind in a car’s dashboard. Of course, butane lighters were contraband around here. And it was definitely a tobacco disincentivizer, making smokers embrace a concrete pole and stick their cigarettes in its fiery, head-high anus. It didn’t seem to faze James, though, and Leo liked him even more for that.

“Sorry. You want one?” He proffered the open pack to Leo.

“No. Thank you,” said Leo. The smoke coming off James’s cigarette looked greasy.

“See, the Stoics, they probably wouldn’t let us smoke. Maybe there’s a Stoic treatment facility. If I say the Stoics are my Higher Power, they have to send me there, right?”

“Speaking of, what are their powers of sending?” Leo asked James. “And do people ever just walk out of here?” Leo was beginning to put together a plan for getting out of Quivering Pines. Clearly, the sisters would have to be appeased, as would Dr. Smugpens. He didn’t want to push too hard; he was still worried about landing in a worse place, an electrodes place.

“Well, you know, it’s not a locked facility.”

“Yeah, why do they keep saying that?”

“I think it helps if they get a runner every now and then. It keeps things taut. We had a genuine B-list rock star here last week.” James mentioned a name. Leo shrugged to indicate he had never heard of him. “The drummer for Skinflute?” said James. Leo nodded as if that meant something. “Wore leather pants. A girl came and got him in a Jaguar after dinner. Can you imagine? How we workshopped about that one.”

Another man shouted to Leo from the patio. “Hey, new guy. You smokin’?”

“Only two men at a time allowed at the smoking station,” James said to Leo, and then he called back to the shouter: “Leo and I are talking, Bob.”

“Smoking station’s for smoking, is all I’m saying,” called Bob.

“Sounds like you’re harboring a resentment, Bob. Go journal about it,” James called back, and he gave Leo a wicked smile, as if they were prank-calling the supermarket. “Some of these guys aren’t so bad, actually. It’s kinda fun, you know?”

Leo did know. Even thirty-six hours into his stay, the interesting absurdities of the place were offering relief from the self-hatred and the incessant buzz of dread that had filled the last weeks.

“It’s a phantasia,” said James.

Leo didn’t understand the word.

“The impression left behind by sensations,” said James. He did a lot of bodywork while smoking and talking: he cupped his elbow in his palm; he scratched at his goatee; he rolled the ashen tip of his cigarette carefully on the rim of the ashtray until it was a clean and rounded ember. “Even that guy Phillip, the guy with the bass boat. He’s an egomaniac, but he’s okay. I mean, when it comes down to it.” James straightened; the light breeze dropped and the sun warmed the earth. He quoted some Stoic into the morning air: “‘I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.’” He scraped his cigarette out on the little metal grate, rubbed his hands together, and then said to Leo, “Come on. Let’s go make some memories.”

In the cafeteria line, waiting for breakfast, Leo met a one-eyed man named Kenny; he was in his twenties, small, wearing a tracksuit, and clearly rougher than most of the other men here. Kenny said that on the outside he collected scrap metal from “unsecured” job sites; he exuded a street knowledge that made him stand out at Quivering Pines, with its pretty paths across clipped lawns and its selection of juices at breakfast. Still, Kenny must have had rich parents, thought Leo, to have ended up here.

“What’s your drug of choice?” Kenny asked him. “Or are you just an alcoholic?” Leo felt cornered by the questions. The phrasing presupposed a certain on-boardness with Twelve Step precepts, and he was trying to stay noncommittal on the point. He could answer,
Dunno. I haven’t tried them all,
or
Drugs aren’t really my problem
. But in the context, either answer would seem snooty. Kenny was just being kind, chatting to the new guy in the cafeteria line. So he said, “Pot, I guess.”