Page 30 of Puck My Pain Away

There’s a payphone in the hall, an actual payphone, for approved calls, and I’m not approved for this one and I do it anyway, standing in the dark hallway in my socks with my heart going. I know his number. I don’t need the phone they locked in the cabinet; the number’s burned into me, ten digits I dialed and texted at two in the morning more times than I’ll ever admit. I tell myself I just want to hear his voice. I tell myself it’s not relapse if it’s only a voice. The truth is dirtier and simpler. The truth is that group cracked me open and the want came roaring back through the crack, the old want, the off-switch, make it stop. He is still, even here, even now, the direction my pain points. I feed the coins in. The slot swallows them with a metal clunk that carries down the empty hall. I dial the ten digits with a shaking finger. I put the sticky receiver to my ear.

And I get a recording. A flat machine voice, no apology in it. The number you have dialed is no longer in service. That’s all. No longer in service. I stand there and dial it again, slower, sure I fumbled it. I get the same three seconds of nothing-voice, the same dead end, and I understand that the door I wasn’t strong enough to close myself has been closed from the other side. He’s gone. The number’s dead. Whatever’s happening to him out there, he has cut the cord I was about to climb back down. I lean my forehead against the cold wall of the hallway with the receiver still in my hand, the dial tone humming. I don’t know if what I feel is grief or rescue. I think it might be both, all the way down, both at once.

And standing there in my socks in the dark hall, I do the thing Russ told me to do when the want comes, which is to put something real in front of it. So I think about Sammy. I think about the empty chair with the party hat, the plate in Theo’s freezer with my name on it, the kid I taught to skate, the boy who set out a place for an uncle who didn’t come because the uncle was two miles away getting worse on purpose. That’s the thing it costs me. Not the career, not even my own life, those are abstractions at two in the morning. Sammy’s plate is not an abstraction. Theo putting his shoulder through my door is not an abstraction. I have a small number of people who would break themselves to keep me alive, and every single time I dialed those ten digits I was choosing a dead number over all of them, choosing the locked room over the kid on the pond. I am twenty-five years old, and I have wasted a year of being somebody’s hero to be somebody’s wreck. I want to be the uncle again. That, more than the ice, more than the name, is the thing I let the receiver fall back into the cradle for. I want to be a man Sammy could set a plate for and have it not stay empty. I push off the wall and I go find Russ’s words for the rest of the night, and I do not dial again.

—

So I go back to group. The late one, the after-dinner meeting. I walk in late, and Maren looks up and doesn’t say anything about the chair I left empty a day ago, just nods me toward an open one. I sit down in it.

I wait until there’s a pause. My hands are doing the steady thing, which I’m grateful for, because the rest of me isn’t steady at all. “I left yesterday,” I say, “because you asked me who wrote the prescriptions, and I didn’t want to answer it.” The circle waits. Maren waits. “My doctor wrote them,” I say. “The team doctor. He wrote them and he kept writing them, stronger and stronger, when anybody honest would’ve stopped.” I make myself keep going, into the part that costs, the part that’s mine. “And I asked him to. That’s the thing I keep trying to leave out. I wasn’t a guy something happened to. I went to him. I asked for more. Every single time, I asked. He had his reasons for giving it to me and they were bad ones, and someday I’ll have a lot to say about him, but he didn’t pour it down my throat. I drove to him drunk and I asked. I’d have found somebody else to ask if it hadn’t been him, because by then I wanted the off-switch more than I wanted my own life, and that part doesn’t have his name on it. That part’s just mine.”

It’s quiet when I finish. Nobody claps, this isn’t that kind of room, but Russ across the circle gives me one slow nod, the nod of a man who knows exactly what that cost. Maren says, “Thank you, Roman,” and means it, and then she moves us on to the next person.

And I stay in my chair. That’s the whole victory, the entire thing I came here to learn how to do. I told the true version with the hand in it, my hand, and then I didn’t run. I sat in the folding chair with my heart kicking, my coffee going cold, and I stayed all the way to the end, through the next guy’s story, the one after that, the closing. When we stood up to say the words at the end, I was still there to say them. I stayed. For the first time in a year, when the real thing got close, I stayed in the room.

It doesn’t feel like a triumph. That’s what nobody tells you about the good days in here, that they don’t come with music. It just feels like sitting in a hard chair past the point I wanted to leave, which Russ says is the whole thing, actually, the entire program in one sentence: you stay past the point you want to leave. The wanting-to-leave never goes away, he says. You just get a little stronger at staying than the wanting is at pulling, and you build that strength the only way it gets built, one hard chair at a time, one true sentence at a time, one dead number you don’t dial twice. I walk back to my narrow room after the closing and I look at the schedule taped to the wall, all those hours spoken for. Tomorrow I’ll do them again, group, work, the meeting, the hard chair, and the day after that. I get the smallest flash of something I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognize it, which is the feeling of being at the start of something instead of the end. Not fixed, not safe, just here on day whatever, with steady hands and a true story and a man down the hall who’ll pick up when I call. It’s not much. It’s the most I’ve had in a year.

22

ELIAS

Iopen the laptop in the morning at the same kitchen table, and the two true lines are gone, because I closed the file last night without saving them, and I find that I’m grateful for that. It means I have to write them again. It means the first thing I do today is decide, fresh, with the light coming gray through the kitchen window and no one watching, whether I’m the man who types the third line or the man who closes the lid.

I type the third line.

Then I type the rest of it, and it comes faster than I expected, faster than anything I’ve written in years, because for once I’m not engineering it. To the Board. I am writing to disclose serious deviations in my prescribing and professional conduct involving a player under my care, Roman Vane, and to disclose that this is not the first instance. I name the private pad. I name the county-line pharmacy I routed the scripts through so they’d never touch the team’s audited system. I write the dosages out, the real ones, the climb of them month over month past anything a knee three months post-op could justify, and I don’t soften the numbers or bracket them in the careful language that would let a reader’s eye slide off the size of them. I write that I postponed the league’s independent assessment with a soft-tissue diagnosis I invented. I write that I knew he was drinking and wrote anyway. And then, because the letter is worthless if it stops at Roman, I write the other name. Prior to my employment with this organization, I was the subject of a sealed complaint at Bellwood Medical Center concerning a patient named Sam Aldridge, whose death involved the same prescribing pattern and the same private channel. That matter was resolved by settlement and resignation. It should not have been.

I read it twice. I don’t fix the sentences that aren’t beautiful. A part of me, the oldest part, wants to go back through and make it read like a man being candid rather than a man confessing, wants to insert the one phrase that would let whoever reads this understand that I understood, that I was always the smartest person in the room even about my own ruin, and I recognize that impulse for exactly what it is, which is the disease itself reaching up through the keyboard to manage the document about the disease. I leave the sentences plain. I attach the dates. I send it to the board. I copy the league’s review counsel, and I copy Sloane, before any of them have served me with a single question. The whole architecture of me is built to answer questions in a way that leaves me standing. The only thing I’ve ever been unable to manage is the thing nobody asked. So I’m not going to wait to be asked. I send it at 7:14 in the morning. The little progress bar fills, then it’s gone, out of my hands, irretrievable. I sit at the table with my coffee going cold and feel the specific vertigo of a man who has just done the one thing he cannot undo and cannot spin.

—

Sloane’s lawyer calls before noon, and the offer is generous, which tells me how frightened the organization is.

Not Sloane herself. A man from the firm the team keeps on retainer, smooth, warm, good at his work. He lays it out like a kindness, which is how these things are always laid out. A quiet resignation. No admission entered. A settlement attached, a number large enough that I hear what they think they’re buying, and a confidentiality clause, and the single condition the whole structure is built around: that my statement, whatever I give to the board, leaves the organization’s name out of it. That I let the failure be mine alone, a rogue clinician, a man who came to them with sealed history they couldn’t have known about, rather than an institution that didn’t dig because it wanted a physician of my caliber cheap and didn’t ask why a physician of my caliber was available.

A day ago, I’d have taken it. Not for the money. For the architecture of it, the cleanness, the version where I exit as a regrettable anomaly and not a pattern the building helped along. It’s a good deal. It’s the deal I’d have built for myself.

And that’s the tell, finally, the thing I can see now that I couldn’t a week ago. The offer isn’t a trap; it’s a mirror. It’s the same move I’ve made my whole life, the controlled disclosure, the harm arranged so the record shows a careful man beside the wreckage instead of inside it, and the firm is offering to do for the team exactly what I did for myself after Sam, which is to let an institution buy back its own innocence with a quiet check and a sealed door. I know the move because I am the move. Taking the deal would mean Bellwood all over again, a second sealing, and somewhere down the line a third Roman in a third city with a third doctor who got hired cheap because nobody asked the question the settlement was designed to bury. I won’t be the reason the question stays buried. Not again.

“No,” I tell him. “Thank you. But no.”

He’s too professional to be surprised out loud, but there’s a pause. Into it he explains, gently, what I’m turning down, the exposure I’m choosing instead. I let him finish because he’s doing his job. “I’ve already sent my statement to the board,” I tell him. “It went this morning. It names everything. I’m not going to send a second one that leaves things out, because the first one is the only honest document I’ve produced in twenty years and I’m not going to follow it with a managed one.” He asks me, carefully, whether I’ve had counsel review the first statement. “No,” I say. “If I’d let a lawyer near it, it would’ve come out smaller.” He doesn’t sign me up for anything. There’s nothing for me to sign and I sign nothing. When the call ends, I set the phone down and understand that I’ve just refused the last lifeline the old self knew how to throw. The refusal cost me something real, a number with a lot of zeros, a soft landing. I don’t want it. Not wanting it is so unlike me I have to sit with it a minute to be sure it’s mine.

—

I call Erin Vasquez back in the afternoon, and this time I don’t give her silence.

She answers on the second ring with my name, no preamble, that practiced gentleness already in place, and I can hear her doing the math on why I’m calling, whether it’s a threat or a plea or a lawyer’s maneuver, because those are the three reasons a man like me ever calls a reporter back. “It’s none of those,” I tell her, before she can decide. “You asked me about Sam Aldridge. I hung up on you twice. I’m calling to answer the question.” There’s a small sound on her end, a chair, a recorder being reached for. She asks, evenly, if she can record. I say yes. She states the date and my name for the tape, then she asks it again, the soft question, tell me about Sam Aldridge. I tell her.

All of it. Who he was, that he was twenty-four, that he came to me in pain and afraid, that I made myself the answer to both. That I wrote him past the line and kept the writing off the audited record. That when his tolerance climbed, I climbed with it; that the dependence I built ran both ways; that I called the half that was mine care. That he relapsed, overdosed, died. That a nurse named Gwen Maddox kept honest notes that should have ended me, and the hospital chose a settlement instead. She asks the follow-ups, the dates, the hospital’s role, whether anyone above me knew. I answer every one without reaching for the deflection that’s always there, the true-sounding sentence that protects me. The strangest thing happens as I do it. The furnace in my chest, the nameless heat I’ve been carrying since the corridor, banks down a little for the first time, not gone, but lower, as if it was only ever the pressure of the unsaid. Near the end, she stops asking and just lets the line breathe, the practiced silence she uses to draw the last thing out, and I give her the last thing without being drawn. “Print all of it,” I tell her. “Don’t soften the numbers. If you make me sound like a man who’s sorry, you’ll have written a kinder story than the one that happened. He’s dead. I’m not the tragedy of this. Print all of it.”

—

That night I box the rest of it for the people who’ll come asking.

There’s a banker’s box already, the one I carried my own life out in, and I empty it onto the table and use it for this instead, which seems right. I go through the apartment and I find every sample I ever brought home, the foil cards, the loose blisters, the two unopened boxes in the bathroom cabinet that I told myself were for legitimate use and were never once for legitimate use. I find the private pad, the physical one, the county-line pad with the carbon backs still showing the ghosts of what I wrote. I put all of it in the box. I don’t dispose of any of it. A man covering himself would flush the samples and burn the pad. I understand, kneeling on the bathroom floor with the cabinet open, that the disposal instinct and the confession I sent this morning cannot both be honored, that you do not get to write the true letter and also destroy the evidence the letter describes. So the box gets everything. I tape it shut. I write the review counsel’s name on the top in marker, the man who’ll come with his questions, and I set it by the door where I can’t pretend I forgot it.

Then I call my lawyer, the one I retained for myself after the suspension, and I confirm the one thing I need confirmed. The private line. The number I gave to a handful of players over the years, the one Roman has, the one that rings to a phone I keep for exactly the contact that should never go through a front desk. He tells me it’s done. Disconnected two days ago on his advice, the moment the no-contact order came down, scrubbed, dead. No longer in service. I make him say it twice, the same flat phrase. I stand in my kitchen and picture the other end of it, some night, some hand that isn’t supposed to be on a phone reaching for the ten digits it knows by heart, getting the machine telling it the road is closed. I have to put my own hand flat on the counter, because I know whose hand. I cut that cord myself, on a lawyer’s instruction, for the cleanest of reasons. It’s the first decent thing I’ve done for Roman in a year, and he will only ever experience it as one more door shut in his face. I will never get to tell him it was the one shut for him instead of against him. That’s how it is now. The good I can do him and the abandonment look identical from his side, and I don’t get a vote on which one he believes.