Page 13 of Puck My Pain Away

He looks at my hand on his sleeve. He looks at me. And whatever’s behind his eyes does that thing again, the move, the flash of something that isn’t the doctor and isn’t the cold. Without a single word, he pulls the stool over with his foot and sits back down beside the table, close, within reach, and lets me keep my fist twisted in his cuff.

I don’t let go.

We sit there in the bright locked room, him on the stool, me on the table with my ruined knee and my wet face and my hand full of his sleeve. Neither of us says anything, and the pain stays gone a little while longer because he stayed. The clock on the wall reads nine-forty. Out past the locked door, a Zamboni idles somewhere, then cuts out, and the building goes even quieter around us. Just the hum of the overhead light and the two of us breathing. And some last sober watchman way back in my head, the one who saw the lock turn and counted the exits, says very quietly, this is the one. Out of all of it, the bottle and the whiskey and the rest, this is the one that’s going to take everything. And I hear him. I hear him clearly.

And I tighten my grip on the sleeve and I stay.

8

ELIAS

The morning after, I run the cleanest session of my professional life.

I prop the door open before he arrives. I set two chairs at a careful distance, and I keep the clipboard up between us like a shield I’m pretending is a tool, and when Roman limps in at ten with his eyes searching my face for last night, I give him nothing. I give him the protocol. Range of motion, flexion degrees, the swelling at the joint line, all of it recorded in my flat hand on the chart. I narrate it like I would to a stranger. And I watch the confusion come up in him, and I do not soothe it.

This is the part no one understands about what I am. They think the danger is the locked door. The danger is the morning after. A man who lunges is a man who can be stopped, caught, charged. I don’t lunge. I withdraw. I give a frightened person the best hour of his life and then I take the warmth away and let him stand in the cold wondering what he did wrong, because nothing binds like the taking-away. Give a starving man a meal and he’s grateful. Give him a meal, then make him wonder if he’ll ever get another, and you own him. He’ll spend every hour between now and the next one trying to earn his way back to the table. I learned that a long time ago, in a different building, with a different boy, and I have never once had to learn it twice.

There’s a word for what I’m doing in the diagnostic manuals, and it isn’t a word I’d use for it, because those words were built to describe people who can’t help themselves, and I can help myself. That’s the distinction I never let myself forget, the one that keeps me out of the comfortable story where I’m sick too. An addict can’t stop. I could stop. I have the file in my drawer that proves what stopping would have cost a boy if I’d done it sooner. I’ve read the two lines. I know the harm down to the hour they found him, and I choose this anyway, in full possession of every fact, every morning, while the door stands open, the corridor bright, and I look like the safest man in the building. The addict at least has the dignity of compulsion. I have only the appetite, and the discipline to feed it slowly, and the cold to watch myself do it.

“That’s the hour,” I tell him, when the hour is up. Not a second over. I cap my pen. “Ice it tonight. I’ll see you Thursday.”

“Elias.” He says my first name like he’s testing whether he’s allowed it now. “About last⁠—”

“Range of motion’s improving.” I’m already at the door, holding it wider, the corridor bright and public behind me. “Keep the dose where it is. Good work today, Roman.”

Good work. I watch the word do what last night’s word did, watch it land in him and pull. And I watch him decide not to finish his sentence, gather his bag, limp out past me into the hall trying to read a face I’ve spent forty years making unreadable. The door’s been open the whole time. Anyone could have walked by. That’s the point. I have given him a public morning to set against the private night, and the gap between the two is where I’ll live in his head now, rent-free, until he can’t stand it and comes to close it himself.

He will. They always come to close it themselves. I never have to be the one who reaches.

—

Two nights later he’s at my office door.

I hear him before I see him, the uneven gait on the corridor tile, the hitch where the bad leg loads. It’s past nine. The wing’s dark except for my office, and I’ve stayed late on purpose, the same as I stayed late the last three nights on purpose, telling myself it’s paperwork, knowing it’s a trap I’ve baited with my own presence and left open. I look up and he’s in the doorway, filling it, big and rumpled, not quite steady on his feet. And the want comes off him so plainly it’s almost hard to look at.

I look to the corridor behind him first. Empty, dark, the cleaning crew not due till eleven. Only then do I let my eyes come back to him, and I take my time about it, because the waiting is part of what I’m giving him.

“I didn’t have a session,” he says. It’s half a question.

“No,” I agree. “You didn’t.”

He doesn’t have a reason and we both know it, and I let the silence sit on him until his throat works. He came two miles across the city with no appointment, no excuse, on a knee that hates the drive, to stand in my doorway and not know what to say. And that is worth more to me than anything he could say. I let him hang there one more moment. Then I stand, and I cross the room past him, close enough to feel the heat and the whiskey coming off him. I shut the door.

The latch clicks. I watch his eyes close at the sound, watch his shoulders come down an inch, the whole big frame of him easing at a noise that should frighten him, and there it is, the thing I do this for, the relief that floods a man when someone else takes the wheel. He drove here white-knuckled and full of static and the click of my door switched it all off. I’m his off switch. He found that out on a treatment-room floor and he hasn’t stopped reaching for it since, exactly as I built him to.

I read him while he settles, because reading people is the one skill under all the others, the thing the license sits on top of. His hands. The right one keeps finding his thigh, pressing, the old athlete’s habit of checking whether the body still belongs to him, and tonight it doesn’t and he knows it. The set of his shoulders, high and forward, a man braced for a hit that already caught him. The flush along his jaw that isn’t all whiskey. His eyes won’t quite hold mine and won’t quite leave them either, glancing, dropping, glancing, a compass that’s found north and hates it. Three weeks ago, this was a man eighteen thousand people loved, who walked into rooms like he owned the deed. Now he sits in my office chair making himself small, and I catalog every inch of the shrinking, not with pity, with something closer to appetite, because every inch of it is mine. I did that. Slow, careful, defensible, mine.

“You’ve been drinking,” I say. Not a question, not a scold. A reading.

“A little.”

“More than a little.” I can smell it, the sweet rot of it under the cold he carried in. I file it where I file everything. The drinking is a problem to a doctor and an asset to me. And I am, in this room, with this door shut, only one of those two things. I stopped pretending otherwise on the third night I watched his game tape like contraband. “Sit down before you fall down.”

He sits.

—

I don’t touch him. Not tonight. Tonight I do something better.