Page 26 of Puck My Pain Away

That’s where it rides, folded once, his clean blue handwriting facing up, and I keep glancing at it at the red lights the same as you’d glance at someone you’re giving a ride to. It’s better company than I’ve got anywhere else tonight, which is the saddest sentence I know about my own life, and I think it anyway. My phone’s going in the cupholder. I make myself look at it at a light. Nine messages. Theo, three of them, you good? / saw the presser, you looked off man, call me / Roman please. Niko, two, my own winger, yo cap proud of you, march 1, let’s gooo and then an hour later …you okay though? Dara, checking I got home. A couple others. Nine people who reached for me today, and the screen lights up with all of them stacked there waiting. I lock it, put it face-down, let them wait, every one, because answering any of them means being the Roman they think they’re texting. And that Roman shook so hard he couldn’t sign his own name this afternoon and is currently driving home with a controlled substance riding shotgun like a date.

I get to the apartment and don’t turn on the lights. I know the wreck of it by heart now, don’t need to see it, and the dark is kinder to it anyway. I set the new script on the counter with the others. The others are a small paper drift by the toaster now, curled at the edges, each one dated in his clean blue hand. I pour a drink in the dark, the good whiskey going into a glass I don’t bother to rinse, and I stand at the black window with the city going on without me down below, all those lit windows full of people who got asked how they are today and answered. And I drink it down and pour the next one.

I know I’m not supposed to mix them. That’s the one rule even a wrecked man knows, the label says it, the seminar said it, Blake said it to my face once before I learned to lie to her, not with alcohol, Roman, never with the alcohol. And I take the new pill anyway, the stronger one, his clean blue handwriting cashed out into my palm, and I wash it down with the second whiskey. The pill alone doesn’t reach the bottom of today, and the whiskey alone doesn’t either. Only the two of them together get me all the way under, down past the white numbers, the shaking hand, the nine missed messages, Vic never asking. I know what I’m doing. I keep coming back to that, it’s the part I’ll never be able to explain to Theo or to whoever else ends up across a table from me someday, that I wasn’t confused, I wasn’t tricked, I knew the rule and I knew the danger and I did it on purpose because being under was worth more to me than being safe. The math had stopped having a downside I could feel. That’s what going under really is. Not the substance. The moment the bottom stops scaring you. And somewhere across town a man hesitated over a pad tonight for one whole second before he fed me deeper. And I hold onto that second in the dark like it’s the only proof left that any of this is happening between two actual people. I drink to it, alone, with my phone face-down on the counter.

18

ELIAS

The on-call line wakes me at 1:40 in the morning, and I know before I answer it. Not the details. The shape.

I keep the team phone on the nightstand, charged, always; the discipline of a man who has built his whole life on being the one they call. It rings with the tone I’ve assigned the club’s after-hours line. I’m awake between the first ring and the second. In the half-second before I lift it there’s a stillness in me that isn’t dread, because I don’t get dread. It’s recognition, the cold flat recognition you feel when a thing you’ve been arranging arrives on schedule. I answer. It’s the assistant GM, his voice scraped raw. He says Theo couldn’t reach Roman, called for hours, finally drove over and put his shoulder through the door, found him on the bathroom floor not breathing right. The ambulance is already there. They’re taking him to County, and can I come.

“I’m coming,” I say. My voice is steady. It’s always steady. The phone is warm against my ear. The room is dark around me, the clock’s red digits the only light. I’m dressed in four minutes. The whole time the steady hands are doing up buttons and finding keys, some far interior room of me is saying the name I’ve been not-saying for weeks, the one I read to the end of the file. It isn’t Roman’s.

I drive to the hospital through empty streets. I do not speed. I notice that I do not speed, and I file the noticing where I file everything.

A man who loved him would speed. That’s the test I keep failing in the dark of the car, the one no panel of doctors ever gave me. Theo, who found him, drove like the truck was on fire; I know it without being told, because that’s what the body does when the person on the floor is the point and not the means. I drive the speed limit to the hospital where Roman Vane is fighting for his life on a combination I prescribed. My hands are easy on the wheel. The only thing moving fast in me is the cataloging, the part that’s already drafting what I’ll say to the attending, what the chart will need, how the night will most likely go. Caleb, then Sam, now this. Three times the call has come in the middle of the night about a young man I told myself I was the answer for, and three times the thing that woke in me first was not terror but inventory. I have spent twenty years being the calmest man at every emergency and calling it a gift. It is only tonight, doing the limit through empty intersections, that I let myself name it as the symptom it is, the flat water where another man’s grief would be. The naming doesn’t speed me up either.

—

The corridor smells of bleach and burnt coffee. A monitor beeps somewhere past the doors, steady, indifferent. The attending finds me in the corridor outside the trauma bay, and she’s good, brisk, unsentimental, and she takes me for what I’m dressed as, which is the team physician arriving to consult on a player.

She has the tox panel. She walks me through it standing up, fast, the shorthand of one clinician to another, and the numbers are bad, the combination is bad, the opioid level stacked on a blood alcohol that on its own would have put him on the floor, the exact lethal arithmetic I could have written out for anyone weeks ago and did write, in effect, every time I tore a sheet off the pad. She asks me the question she has to ask. “You’re his prescribing physician of record. I need the full medication history. What’s he on, what doses, how long, anything off-protocol?”

And I give it to her.

I stand in that corridor under the bad light and I recite it, all of it, the drug, the strength, the escalation, the dates, the most recent increase four days ago, my voice level, complete, professional, the history of exactly how I did this delivered in the clean grammar of medicine to the woman trying to undo it. I leave nothing out. That’s the thing I’ll turn over later, that when the moment came to give the account that damns me, I gave it flawlessly, no hedge, no soft edge, because the doctor in me is real. The doctor in me wants her to have everything she needs to pull him back. The doctor in me is also, with the same breath, reciting his own indictment, feeling the two things happen in the single sentence, not divided by them. She writes it down. I watch her hand move across the chart, getting it all, my name implied in every line of it. I understand that I am standing here helping her build the document that ends me, that I would not change a word, because the words are what he needs. Somewhere under the cold, the appetite and the healer have finally been made to want the same thing. It took this to do it.

“How long has he been like this?” she asks, not looking up.

“Months,” I say. The truest word I’ve said out loud in a year.

—

Theo is in the waiting room.

I almost don’t go in. There’s a version of the night where I stay in the corridor with the clinicians, in my costume, useful, and never cross into the room full of people who love him, because those are different rooms and I have always lived in the first one. But I go in, because not going in would itself be a tell, and Theo is there, still in the coat he threw on, his hands filthy from something, and his face when he sees me is not anything I’ve prepared for. He doesn’t ask me what happened. He doesn’t ask me anything.

He stands up. He reaches into his coat pocket. And he takes out the bottle.

It’s the private one. The one I wrote four days ago on my own pad, the channel that doesn’t exist on any team sheet, the supply I moved off the audited system so that Blake could never reach it, and I had forgotten the one thing a private script cannot hide, which is the label. The physical bottle. He must have found it on the counter or the floor, picked it up with the reflex of a man grabbing evidence he doesn’t yet understand, and carried it here in his pocket the whole time they were working on his best friend.

He holds it up. He turns it so the label faces the light. And he reads, out loud, slow, in a flat voice with nothing left in it, the prescribing line. The drug. The date. And the name of the prescribing physician.

It’s my name.

Then he stops. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t accuse me, doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t throw the bottle or come across the room. He just reads my name off the bottle. Then he looks at me, holding it up between us, and lets the silence do the entire thing. The silence is worse than any sentence he could have built, because Theo isn’t a clever man and he hasn’t assembled the whole architecture of it, the sessions, the nights, the arrangement. But he doesn’t need to. He has my name on the bottle that nearly killed Roman, and he has the look on my face, which I cannot feel but which he is reading, and the two of them are enough. He sits back down with the bottle in his fist and turns his eyes to the doors they took Roman through and does not look at me again.

And I watch him wait, this big plain man with dirt on his hands from climbing into a window or breaking a lock to reach his friend, and I understand that I am looking at the thing I have spent my whole life unable to manufacture. Theo drove like the truck was on fire. Theo has a kid, I know that much from Roman’s wreckage, a godson, a boy who set out a plate. Theo is the kind of man who shows up, who keeps showing up, who let himself in tonight because some animal in him knew the silence on the phone meant a body on a floor. He didn’t have to assemble evidence to come. The love did it for him, fast and stupid and certain, the love that doesn’t pause to draft what it’ll say to the attending. That is the apparatus I don’t have. I’ve watched it in other people like you’d watch a color you were told existed and couldn’t see. I built a whole life out of standing next to it, feeding on its hunger, choosing boys for the lack of a Theo, boys with empty rooms and no one at all driving fast through the night for them, because a boy with a Theo is a boy someone comes for. Roman had one the whole time. I knew it and I took him anyway. The one I took him from is sitting eight feet from me holding the proof in his fist, and he will not look at me. The not-looking is the most accurate verdict I have ever received.

I stand there. I am a man who has, three times in three cities, controlled the entire weather of a room by saying the reasonable thing in the reasonable voice, and I have nothing. There is no reasonable sentence here. There is a bottle with my name on it and a man who loves Roman holding it. For the first time in twenty years of doing this, I am in a room I cannot manage, and I find I don’t try. I don’t reach for the explanation. I let him not look at me. It’s the only honest thing I have to offer and it costs me nothing because it isn’t a choice; there’s simply nothing in the playbook for this, no move, and under the cold something registers the absence of a move as a kind of falling.

—

They put me in the corridor and I sit out the night in the plastic chairs. The seat is cold through my slacks. A vending machine hums against the far wall, its light stuttering on a loose ballast. My coat weighs nothing on my knees.

I don’t have to stay. My consult is done; I gave the attending the history; there is no medical reason for the prescribing physician to occupy a chair outside the unit until dawn, and there is every reason for him not to. But I stay. I sit in the row of bolted plastic chairs under the fluorescent hum with my coat folded over my knees, and I do not know why I stay, which is itself remarkable, because I always know why I do things. I have an answer for every act, and for this one I have nothing but the fact of the staying. The night goes on around me, the gurneys, the soft codes, the families, and I sit in it not praying, because I don’t, not bargaining, because I have nothing to bargain with and no one to bargain to, just sitting, present, a cold man in a plastic chair keeping a vigil he can’t account for over a boy he nearly killed.