Page 27 of Puck My Pain Away

I sat in a corridor like this for Sam too. Different city, worse chairs, the same fluorescent hum, the same coat over the same knees, and I sat it out then exactly as I’m sitting it out now, and when the doors opened that time the word the nurse used was not stable. I have carried that word’s absence in the cold drawer for two years and felt nothing I could point to. I had decided, somewhere I never looked at directly, that I was simply a man without the feeling apparatus the others have, defective in that one place, adapted around it, like a person born without smell stops missing what they can’t conceive of. That was the story. Tonight the story is failing. Because something is happening in the plastic chair that has no name in my vocabulary—a pressure, a wrongness, a furnace I can’t see that I’m sitting too close to—and I keep running the diagnostic on myself and coming back with nothing, no grief in the shape I’d recognize it, no remorse with edges I could hold, just this unaccountable refusal to leave a corridor I have no reason to occupy. I don’t know what it is. I have never not known what something in me is. And I sit with the not-knowing the same as I sit with everything, except this one won’t be filed, it won’t go in the drawer, it stays out in the room with me hour after hour, humming under the lights, the first thing in twenty years that won’t do what I tell it.

I read the file to the end three days ago. I knew the ending. I walked back into it with my eyes open and my hand steady. Tonight the ending arrived. The only difference between this corridor and the one at Bellwood is that this time the boy is, a nurse tells me near five a.m., stable. She says it in passing, kind, thinking I’m staff. He’s stable. They think he’ll be okay. And I stand up.

I stand up. I pick up my coat off my knees, put it on, and I leave. I don’t go in. The doors are right there, and he’s behind them, stable, alive, the ruined beautiful thing that is the only warmth in my cold life. I could go in. I turn and walk the other way, down the corridor, out through the sliding doors into the blue dark of almost-morning, and I leave without seeing him. I tell myself nothing about why. I don’t have a why. But I think, walking to the car in the cold, that it is the first thing I have done all winter that wasn’t appetite, that for once I took myself away from the thing I want instead of toward it, and that I don’t know if that’s the beginning of mercy or just the cleanest version of running, and that I am not, it turns out, equipped to tell the difference. Sam never got stable. I drive home in the dawn. I do not feel relief. I do not feel grief. I sit with the absence where both of those should be, and the absence, tonight, for the first time, feels like a wound and not a feature.

—

Blake comes in the morning, and she brings the folder.

I’ve gone home, showered, come back, because there are things a team physician does after a player is hospitalized and I am still, on paper, that, for a few more hours. I’m in the corridor outside the attending’s office when Blake comes through the doors at the end of it, and she’s got the folder under her arm, the thick one, the pharmacy logs, the highlighted climb, all of it, the record she told me she was keeping, and she walks the length of the corridor toward me with it.

She stops in front of me. She looks at me, once, full in the face. There’s no triumph in it, no fear in it, none of the things there used to be, just a flat finished assessment, the look of a person confirming a fact she’d hoped to be wrong about and isn’t. She doesn’t say anything to me. There’s nothing she needs from me anymore; I’m not a person she’s trying to reach or a senior she’s trying to move, I’m the subject of a file, and you don’t talk to the file. She holds my eyes for one second longer. Then she steps around me. She knocks on the attending’s door, goes in with her folder, shuts the door behind her. Through the frosted glass I watch the two of them sit down together. I stand alone in the corridor on the wrong side of a door for the second time in mere hours. I understand that the managing is over, all of it, that there is no version of the reasonable man who walks out of this building still holding the instruments. And I find that the thing I feel, standing there, is not fear of the ending.

It’s that I won’t be the one writing his scripts anymore. And under the cold, where nothing has reached in twenty years, that lands like loss.

19

ROMAN

Icome back to the world in pieces, and the first piece is a sound I know better than my own heartbeat: Theo breathing.

I’ve heard Theo sleep a thousand times. Road trips, junior billets, the floor of my first apartment, that deep even rasp with the little catch at the top of each breath. Before I’ve got my eyes open or any idea where I am, my body recognizes it and goes loose with a relief it decides on without me. Then the rest of awareness comes. The smell of the place, the antiseptic and something under it that’s just sick. The weight of a needle taped to the back of my hand, a line running up off it. A blanket that’s too thin and washed too many times. A beeping somewhere to my left, slow and steady, counting something in me I almost lost. My mouth tastes like I’ve been chewing pennies. My whole body aches like I went twelve rounds with the boards, and there’s a rawness down my throat that I’ll understand later was a tube.

Hospital. I’m in a hospital. And the steady breathing is Theo, folded into a vinyl chair that’s three sizes too small for him, his big frame jackknifed, his chin on his chest, one hand still hanging off the armrest toward the bed like he fell asleep reaching.

I shift, and it costs me. Everything pulls and complains. The small sound I make is enough. His head comes up. For a second, his eyes are unfocused and lost, a man surfacing from somewhere bad. Then they find me, find me awake and looking at him, and his whole face breaks open. He’s got my forearm in his grip before I can say anything, both hands now, holding on like I might slide back under if he doesn’t anchor me to the bed, and his voice when it comes is wrecked, low and shaking, nothing like the easy Theo I know.

“You scared the hell out of me,” he says. “You scared the hell out of me, Roman.” That’s all he can get out. His eyes are wet. He doesn’t let go of my arm, and I lie there and take the full weight of what I did to him land on my chest, because I know that voice now. I gave it to him; I’m the reason my best friend sounds like that.

I get the rest of it in pieces over the next hour, from a nurse and from the dents in Theo’s own face. He called me for four hours. Texted, called, called again, like he’s done a hundred times that I ignored a hundred times. Except this time something in the silence scared him enough that he got in his truck near midnight, drove over, pounded on my door, and then, when I didn’t answer, put his shoulder through it. He’s the one who found me on the bathroom tile. He’s the one who rolled me on my side, got me breathing, called it in, rode in the ambulance, and sat in this chair through whatever they did to me with the tube. Fifteen years I’ve known this man. I taught his kid to skate. I stood up at his wedding. I missed Sammy’s sixth birthday three weeks ago for a locked room, left a six-year-old staring at a chair with a party hat. Tonight, that same family’s father broke down my door to keep me alive. The arithmetic of that, what I’ve been spending and who’s been paying, finally adds all the way up while he holds my arm and can’t talk. It is the most ashamed I have ever been in my life, and also, somehow, the first time in months I’ve felt like I’m worth saving, because look at him. Look what he did. You don’t break down a door for a man who’s already gone.

—

I don’t get to hide in the fog for long. They don’t let you, here.

A woman comes in mid-morning, after they’ve taken my vitals and changed the bag, after Theo’s gone down to call people and tell them I’m awake. She’s maybe fifty, solid, gray-streaked hair pulled back, reading glasses pushed up on her head, a chart in her hands. She pulls the visitor chair around to face me and sits down in it like she’s got all the time in the world and no intention of softening anything. “Roman, I’m Maren Sullivan,” she says. “I’m a counselor here. Addiction and recovery. I’m going to be straight with you, because in my experience straight is the only thing that’s ever worked, and you’ve had a building full of people being gentle with you for a long time and look where it got you.”

And then she reads me my own blood.

She does it from the chart, flat, unflinching, the actual numbers, what they pulled out of my system the night they brought me in. The opioid level, and the name of it, and how many times past a safe dose it was. The blood alcohol on top of it, high enough to be its own emergency. The two of them together, she says, and what that combination does, which is stop you breathing, which is exactly what it had started to do on my bathroom floor before Theo got the door open. She doesn’t editorialize. She doesn’t call me a junkie and she doesn’t call me a victim. She just lays the chemistry of my own near-death out on the blanket in front of me in numbers and makes me look at it. I’ve spent months not looking at any of it, sliding all of it one room over behind the wall. She won’t let me. She keeps her eyes on me while she reads so I have to be in the room with it.

“That’s not a man managing pain,” she says, when she’s done. “I want you to hear me, because the next part only works if you do. You’re not a guy who took too much one bad night. You have a substance use disorder. It has a name and a shape and a whole lot of people have survived it, but not one of them survived it by calling it something else. So we’re going to call it what it is, you and me, starting now.” She sets the chart down. “Can you say it back to me? What it is?”

And it’s the hardest sentence I’ve ever had to put in my mouth, harder than any apology, because saying it means I can’t keep the version of myself where this is temporary, where I was going to fix it tomorrow, where the locked room was a thing that was happening to me instead of a thing I was doing. My throat works. The penny taste is still in it. “I’m an addict,” I say, barely, the first true thing I’ve said out loud since the fall. It comes out cracked and small, and it is the realest I have felt in months, more real than any high, because it’s the first thing I’ve said in months that doesn’t need a lie standing under it to hold it up.

“Yeah,” Maren says, gentle for the first time. “You are. Okay. Now we’ve got something to work with.”

What she doesn’t have to tell me, because my body’s already teaching it to me by the hour, is what coming off it feels like. They’ve got me on something to take the edge off, she says, a taper, monitored, but the edge it’s taking off must be a cliff, because what’s left is bad enough. My skin doesn’t fit. That’s the closest I can get to it. I’m hot then I’m shaking-cold, sweating through the thin gown so they change it twice before noon. My legs won’t stay still, this deep crawling restlessness in the long muscles like there are ants living in the bone. I keep kicking the blanket off and dragging it back. My guts are wrong. My eyes water for no reason. Every sound is too loud, the light through the window too much. Underneath all of it, steady as the monitor, is the want, the pure animal want, a voice with no words in it that just points at the door and says fix this, you know how to fix this, one call fixes this. It’s not in my head. That’s what I never understood from the outside, watching guys go through it. I thought it was weakness, a failure of wanting to quit. But no. It’s in the marrow. It’s a thirst in tissue that doesn’t have opinions about my recovery. And I lie there, sweating, shaking, riding it out minute by ugly minute. I understand for the first time that getting clean isn’t a decision you make once in a hospital bed. It’s a thing you’re going to have to survive, in your own body, over and over, probably for the rest of your life.

—

He comes in the afternoon. Of course he comes.

I’m propped up by then, picking at a tray I can’t eat, and I feel him before I see him, that old pull, the body’s stupid compass swinging toward its north. I look up and Elias is in the corridor outside my door, on the other side of the glass, in his coat, still and contained, looking at me through the window with that flat, unreadable quiet that used to be the only thing that could turn the noise in my head down. And God help me, it still pulls. That’s the thing nobody warns you about; that knowing exactly what a man did to you doesn’t reach down and unhook the part of you that he became the answer for. I see him and some deep, wrecked circuit in me lights up with the old want, not even for him exactly, for the off-switch, for the quiet, for the one place the word done couldn’t follow me. My heart goes faster. The monitor to my left tattles on it, the beeps speeding up, and I hate that it knows; I hate that my own pulse is loyal to him after everything.

He doesn’t come in. He’s waiting, I realize. Waiting to see what I’ll do, the same as he always waited, because making me come to him was always how he worked. And there’s a version of this where I do. Where I lift a hand, or just don’t say anything, and let the nurse wave him in. He sits in that chair where Maren read me my blood, puts his hand on the back of my neck, and the noise stops. It would be so easy. Every cell I’ve got is voting for easy.

The nurse is right there, checking my line. “That’s my doctor,” I hear myself say, and my voice is shaking. “From the team. I don’t—” The pull yanks at me, vicious. I shut my eyes for a second and I think about Theo’s face this morning, you scared the hell out of me. I think about Maren reading the numbers, Sammy’s empty chair with the party hat, the bottle that had his name on it doing what it did to me on the tile. “No visitors,” I say. “Him especially. I don’t want to see him. Please don’t let him in.”