Page 16 of Puck My Pain Away

And here’s the thing I understand now that I didn’t a month ago, kneeling on the floor with him pulling himself back together above me. I used to think addicts were weak. I did. I’m an athlete, or I was, and I believed what athletes believe, that the body does what the mind tells it, that wanting something badly enough is a character flaw you can train out of yourself like a bad habit on your backhand. I had opinions about guys who blew up their careers on this stuff. I was sure it would never be me, because I was disciplined, because I had the C, because I could squat four hundred pounds and run a room. And it turns out none of that is armor. It turns out the discipline just means I’ll be more thorough about my own destruction, that I’ll drive across a city at midnight with the same focus I used to bring to a faceoff, that the strongest part of me got handed straight over to the thing that’s killing me and went to work for it. I’m not weak. That’s the joke. A weak man might have left after the first time. It took everything I had to come back.

—

He gives me almost nothing after. A hand on the back of my neck, brief, the closest he comes to kindness. And then he’s straightening his clothes, telling me to get dressed and get home and hydrate. The cold’s already coming back down over him like a shutter. I dress with my hands still shaking, and I go, because that’s the deal, even if neither of us ever said it. You get the twenty minutes and then you get put out into the night.

A better man would feel used. I keep waiting for it, the insult of being walked to the door by a man who had me on his floor a minute ago, the sting a worse kind of wanting ought to leave. It doesn’t sting. That’s what should scare me and doesn’t. I’ve spent my whole life being wanted for what I could do for people, the goals, the wins, the highlight that makes a kid put your poster up, and every bit of that love came with a bill attached: stay great, keep producing, don’t get hurt. Then I got hurt and the love packed up and went home, all of it, in about a week. So a man who wants me when I’ve got nothing left to produce, who wants me precisely broken, wants the wreck and not the highlight, that doesn’t feel like being used. It feels like the most honest thing anybody’s ever offered me. He’s the only one who never needed me to be okay. I’d rather be his ruin than anybody else’s hero. I know how sick that is. I think it anyway, and I carry it down to the truck like something warm.

It’s three a.m. when I’m driving home, one-footed, the city empty and orange-lit, and I feel the warmth receding mile by mile, the wrongness coming back up to meet me, the knee, the silence, the apartment waiting. At a red light I pick up my phone. Theo’s voicemail is still sitting there, the little red one, hey man, just checking in. I look at it. I think about the photo, the cup, the sunburn, the version of me he’s trying to reach. And I delete it. Unheard. I press the trash and it’s gone. And I tell myself it’s because I’ll call him properly tomorrow, and I know it’s because I can’t stand to hear a good man love a guy who’s not here anymore.

I tell myself the thing I tell myself every time now. This is the last one. I’ll stop after this one. I’ve said it about the whiskey and the pills, and now I say it about him. And some sober watchman way down in me, the one who saw the lock turn the first night, says quietly that I’ve never once stopped after the last one, that there’s no such thing as the last one, that’s the whole disease.

The light goes green. I drive. And at a stoplight two blocks from home, before I’ve decided to, my thumb finds his name and I text him.

good night

I don’t expect an answer. I just need him to have it, need the day to end on him. I drive the last two blocks holding the phone in my lap, and the screen stays dark, and that’s all right. I’ll be back. We both know I’ll be back. There’s no decision left in it, hasn’t been for a while now, only the dark between one time and the next, the drive, the lock. I think that might be the only true thing left in my life.

10

ELIAS

Imove his sessions to the last slot of the day, and I send the assistant trainer home at six.

It’s the kind of small administrative decision no one questions, a senior clinician arranging his own schedule, and that’s the architecture of me, that every door I open looks from the outside like ordinary housekeeping. I tell Marcus I’ll lock up, that I want the quiet for the harder protocol work. He’s glad of the early night, doesn’t think twice. By the time Roman limps in at half past eight the wing is dark and empty and mine, every other office black, the cleaning crew not due till eleven. I have built us a building. I do it a piece at a time, a schedule change here, an early dismissal there, nothing that would draw a second look on its own. The sum of the harmless pieces is a locked facility at night with no one in it but the two of us. I assembled it in plain sight, the same as I assemble everything.

He comes in rattled. I can read the day on him before he’s through the door—the bad day stacked on the bad week, the shake in his hands, the liquor I’ll smell when he’s closer. He comes toward me already reaching, already half-asking, the want so naked on him now that there’s almost no man left over it, and a colder part of me notes with satisfaction how far that’s come in three weeks, how completely the proud thing that fell on the ice has reorganized itself around me.

People imagine men like me as creatures of impulse, as if the harm were a thing that overcomes us, a wave we’re swept under. The opposite is true. There’s nothing impulsive in any of it. I selected him before I ever touched him, in Sloane’s office, reading a file: a man with a father who loves a scoreboard, no partner, no children, a body about to fail him and a profession that’s the only thing holding his identity together. I read the gaps the same as I’d read a scan. No one under him. That’s the only criterion that’s ever mattered. I don’t choose the loved ones; the loved ones have somewhere to fall that isn’t me, and somewhere-else-to-fall is the one thing that ruins the work. I choose the ones already in the air. Then I become the floor, slowly, by being the only steady thing in a falling man’s life, and steadiness is the easiest thing in the world to fake when you feel nothing and have all the time there is. Roman thinks he found me. He thinks he reached for me out of some weather in himself. He didn’t. I stood exactly where a falling man’s hand would land and I waited. And waiting, for me, has never once been hard.

I let him get within reach, close enough that I can smell the whiskey and the cold he carried in on his coat, close enough to feel the heat coming off him. Then I step back, and I watch the loss of it hit his face.

“Sit,” I tell him. “We’re going to do this properly tonight.”

He lowers himself onto the padded table. The vinyl creaks under his weight. His knee is wrapped from the afternoon skate, the tape gone gray at the edges.

—

Making him wait is the part I love most and would never say.

Anyone can take. Taking’s nothing; the appetite of children and brutes. What I do is finer. I make him name it. I sit him down in the bright treatment room. I tell him, flat and unhurried, exactly what’s going to happen and exactly what he’s going to have to do to earn it. Then I wait, hands folded, while it costs him. Because the relief isn’t in the act for him. I worked that out weeks ago. The relief is in the surrender, in handing the whole unbearable weight of being Roman Vane to someone who’ll carry it, and surrender you can’t take. Surrender has to be given. So I make him give it, piece by piece, out loud, and I don’t move until he has.

“Ask me,” I say. “Properly. We both know how you want to.”

And I watch the last of the captain go. I watch a man who wore a letter on his chest, who eighteen thousand people stood and screamed for, lower his eyes and ask me for it in the words I’ve taught him, his voice cracking on the please. The thing I feel watching it is not lust, or not only lust. It’s the old enormous fullness, the hole closing over, the one feeling that has ever made the static in me go quiet. He thinks I’m the one with the power here. That’s the joke I never tell. I’m the one starving. He just can’t see my hunger because I’ve spent forty years learning to wear it as patience.

“Good,” I tell him when he’s said it right. “There. That wasn’t so hard.”

—

He’s brought the empty bottle with him, almost, the smell of it on every word, and before we go further he asks me for the thing he always asks me for now.

“I need more. The dose isn’t holding. Two days it lasts now, then I’m—” He stops. “I need more.”

I should say no. There’s a version of this where a doctor says no, where a doctor smells the whiskey under the request and counts the days since the last script and writes nothing, calls someone, closes the file. I know that doctor. I could do an excellent impression of him; I do, for Sloane, for Blake, for the chart. Instead, I take the pad from the drawer. I write him the heavier script in my clean prescriber’s hand, the next strength up. I tear it off, set it on the counter, and I say nothing about the drinking. Nothing. I don’t even let it cross my face. And I don’t write it in the chart, because the chart is the version of me that exists for other people. This, the script on the counter and the silence around the whiskey, is the version that only exists in rooms like this one, with the door locked and no one to read it.

He takes the script. His hand closes on it, that drowning grip, and his shoulders come down an inch. There it is, the relief flooding him at the sight of the paper. I feel the answering flood in myself, the being-reached-for. We stand there a moment, two addicts in a bright room, each one’s poison the other’s gift.

The drinking is the part that should stop me, if anything were going to. I’m not naive about what the alcohol does on top of the opioids. I trained in the same schools as every doctor who’d take one look at this chart and intervene; I know the arithmetic of respiratory depression better than they do. Mixing the two is how the night ends badly, how a man goes to sleep and the breathing forgets to continue, how an incident note gets written with an hour on it. I know all of it. And I write the heavier script anyway and say nothing about the bottle, and the reason isn’t that I want him dead, I don’t, the dead can’t reach for you. The reason is that the alcohol is his, the one thing in this he chose without me. To take it from him I’d have to be his doctor in this room instead of his floor. I can’t be both. I made that choice weeks ago. So I do the thing I always do. I caution him about the water. I create the record that shows a careful man. And I leave the actual danger sitting in his own hands, because managing it properly would cost me the thing I’m here for, and I have never once paid that price, not for Sam, not for anyone.