by Adam Klein
Hannah talks about the film she saw at the Bijou while I was gone, Celine and Julie Go Boating. She describes its images, its hypnotic, inexorable repetitions. ‘I’m astonished by the conservatism of film now,’ she says. ‘The ‘60s and ‘70s were so much more morally ambiguous.’ She’s painting too. ‘Just small things,’ she says, and I recognize how modesty is her way of not jinxing this troubled start.
‘Gina was supposed to bring King back today. But she didn’t. I can’t reach her.’ I don’t mention that I’m troubled by the cottage, that something felt wrong. But perhaps it really was that I’d expected King and so it had a strange abandoned feeling about it.
‘The electricity went out briefly yesterday. The weather’s been horrible. Don’t worry about it. Why don’t you just come over to my place?’
I tell myself I’ll check my messages from there. Then decide to drive by Gina’s before I go to Hannah’s. I don’t want to bring Hannah to Gina’s or to my place; it would be too awkward. I realize I’m still embarrassed about the other night, potentially endangering her by asking her to stay with me. Plus, I just want to get King home while it’s early. I can visit Hannah later tonight. I tell her my plan, and she says that’s fine. Then she leans back.
‘Do you think it wasn’t him we saw the other night?’
Her question makes me angry, but I’m unsure of why it does, and I try not to show it. ‘I don’t know who that was. I can’t do everything under the assumption he’s here. You saw the car as well as I did. Are you certain?’
She sits silently, looking at me until I’m uncomfortable. ‘I don’t think you should doubt yourself. I think that’s more dangerous than trusting your instincts.’
‘I don’t have instincts. I have fears. They’re not the same.’
‘In your case they may be.’ She leans forward, whispering. ‘I believe in planning. Most people don’t have the benefit of planning for the worst. There’s no reason we have to take things as they come.’
I look at her, perplexed by her suggesting there’s some benefit to my situation. She’s drunk, I think. And it’s only just after 5 P.M.
‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ I say, standing up and gathering my coat.
When Victor’s on a ‘job,’ it’s something he doesn’t want me inquiring about. I try to go about my business without noticing, making it on time to the office, eating dinner alone, waiting for him to show up, usually in the middle of the night. We get a studio apartment in a building where he knows the manager. Same neighborhood as my old hotel, but it feels like progress. I don’t like the manager; he sticks his head in the door too often. ‘Just making sure you’re up to no good,’ he says. Victor asks him in, and then they leave together after their conversation has become inaudible, distracted, coded.
Victor’s passionate when he makes money, also when he’s high. He doesn’t think I notice these changes in him. He doesn’t want me to know how much he’s made, how much drugs he has at his disposal. He likes withholding, holding these things over me. It’s obvious. His lies are obvious. It makes him seem like a kid, but it’s not endearing. He wants me to act like I don’t know what he’s been up to, so he can surprise me, or so he won’t disappoint me. And from the beginning I play wife, girlfriend, whatever uninterested, undemanding thing I’m supposed to be. For a few months, anyway. For a few months I let him determine how much I’ll use, when I’ll use it. I don’t tell him about Bill; that I’ve already had a boyfriend who introduced me to the world of dependencies, tended to my needs.
I wait for him to fix me for the first few months. Days that move like sludge. It’s like waiting for things to degrade, to change their shape. But I’m edgy, less inclined to make it to my job if he gets home late. Now I want the fruits of his stolen TVs, stolen sides of beef, stolen computers, motorcycles, credit cards. I don’t want to sit in the apartment while he goes out all night, selling coke for heroin and cutting a little bit here and there so he can stay high while he does it.
Victor knew what he was looking at when he saw me. I’m every bit as desperate as he is. I’m not new to this. Janine knew this when she hung up on me: even if she’s clean, this can’t last; it’s an aberration. She knew I hadn’t had the experience yet, the one that changes who you are essentially, the one that purifies, turns your blood to harp strings. People make decisions to get clean all the time. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the wrong motives. She thinks I let go of drugs, of the lifestyle, only so I wouldn’t burn my hands on the rungs going down. In her eyes I was still falling.
And when I first asked Victor to fix me, I meant it in every way possible. But he knew only the one way. He was reluctant. ‘This could change us,’ he said, though he wasn’t concerned with what we’d become, just that we wouldn’t continue being what we were. ‘It will bring us together,’ I assured him. Now I’ll do it myself, thank you. Now I don’t even trust him to destroy me. He doesn’t attend to it quick enough. And I decide that I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to keep up with him.
We will both be on this wheel together. I see it narrowing, and we’re suspended on it like empty buckets. The wheel is celestial; its rotations include heaven and hell, the highs and then the unbearable lows. And with the first shot, my mind drifts off over the past few months, and I think: I’m still a good person when I’m high. I’m still a person who would stop at harming someone else. The words – not even spoken – have a drift of their own and are carried off, weightless.
No one answers the door, so I walk to the back of Gina’s house and look into the windows. There’s lights on, but no one downstairs, no way to climb up and check if someone’s in the upstairs bedroom. I think she’s probably at my place, dropping off King, writing me a note of apology. I decide to drive home and wait for her. No point in bothering Hannah when I just told her I would be going over there later. But I’m nervous about going back to my place, a little less so each time I make the trip. I had a little scare a few nights ago, but there’s no point in dwelling on it. I wonder what Hannah meant by planning, though. If there weren’t some way I’m missing an opportunity to turn this around. I hate drunkenness. Though now it seems less likely she was drunk.
The Valiant takes forever to warm up. I sit there revving the engine, staring blankly at Gina’s house. Could he have come here, posed as someone looking for a massage, then done something to her and to King? Why didn’t I tell her about him? I put it out of my mind. She doesn’t need to be privy to my phantoms. Besides that, talking about him might make him materialize. You learn that as a junkie; dealers arrive on empty streets, a magical presence responding to your needs, announcing themselves with the tapping of canes or whistling from mouths full of aching teeth. The only thing an addict can’t conjure is money.
On the ride to my cottage I listen to Hannah’s tape of Blondie’s Plastic Letters. I almost laugh at the irony of the lyrics: Something in my consciousness told me you’d appear. Now I’m always touched by your presence, dear.
I take the roads slowly, carefully. As I make my way out of downtown, I notice a car turn around in the parking lot of a long-empty restaurant, a place where I’d noted amusing graffiti, a painting of a woman’s outsized silhouette, a teacup balanced on her exaggerated buttocks. The car turns out and follows at least a couple of hundred feet behind me. I note it in my rearview mirror. It’s not the same car I saw pull up at my place, and the driver appears to be keeping his distance. It’s dark outside, and people are leaving work. The darkness may as well be their collective misery. Tomorrow I’ll have to return to work. Frances will be leaving soon to start setting up her new home; she’s quietly trying to sign off on as many of our cases as she can. I’m sure she’ll inquire about Hannah, ask me why I closed her case early. ‘We chose friendship’ will not go over well. I’ll simply note that she never returned. Bureaucracies welcome disappearances; these people would be invisible if it weren’t for us, anyway.
I take the long flat empty road that curves like a tossed rope
through snow-covered cornfields. When I make this left, I leave all the cars behind me; this ten minutes of driving is like a private entryway to my place. A minute or so on it and I notice that car again, turning after me. The road’s treacherous; the city road crews treat it like a private drive, not their jurisdiction. I drive it at twenty miles per hour, still gripping the wheel. The car behind me flashes its lights. ‘What do you want from me, you idiot?’ I holler, looking in the rearview mirror. What does he think I’m going to do, stop and offer directions? The ice is shadowy, impossible to navigate.
His car glides side to side like a heavy black cradle. His flashing blinds me, so I stop looking in the mirrors. I sense him up on my car, now. No one would try intimidation on this road; he’ll get us both killed. But I speed up, anyway. Is it Gina or Rachel in someone else’s car? Could they have asked someone else to drop King off for them? I look again in the rearview mirror and can vaguely make out the features of a man behind the wheel, obliterated almost immediately by the flashing of his high beams. I step on the gas, hearing my own breath catch, trying to identify those features. There’s a hill on the road, and I remember I need to prepare for it, slow down, but I lose control before I can. My car slides out and smashes into an embankment. There’s only a moment before an eerie ice-blue light descends with the impossible, muffled silence of a burial. I hold the wheel, stunned.
Just then I’m startled by rapping on my window. I literally fling myself to the other side of the seat, cautiously looking over the features of the man calling my name through the glass.
‘Carrie?’ He wipes away the steam of his breath with a black glove. ‘Are you all right?’
I’m suddenly raging, hollering. ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you trying to do, kill us?’
‘Joel Case,’ he says, assuming my rage isn’t personal. ‘Remember? From the bar.’
It takes me a moment. The psychiatrist. Just what I need. I lean forward and roll down the window. The freezing wind rushes in, and the strange light outside suffuses the car. The black, barren arms of trees form a monstrous knot behind him. ‘I saw you leaving downtown and thought I could get your attention.’
‘You frightened me. I didn’t know who you were, and the roads are so slick.’ I hear myself reprimanding him. I recognize his expression from the time Hannah launched her tirade against him. He must seek out abuse, I think ruefully. Or perhaps he’s one of those people plagued by problems of timing. Still, I’m relieved it’s him.
‘I saw you, so I turned around and followed.’ He’s standing about a foot away from the window now. He won’t get any closer unless he’s invited. ‘Did you think I was someone else?’
‘I don’t invite people out here,’ I say. ‘I knew it was someone uninvited.’
He’s silent for a moment. ‘I’ll go, then.’ He starts to turn and walk off, but I call him back before he gets even a few steps away.
‘You didn’t expect me to know it was you,’ I say. ‘I was frightened.’
‘I’m sorry I scared you.’ His look changes from wounded to concerned. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, though I might need some help out of here. My house is on the right. Do you want to come by for tea or something?’
He helps me reverse the car by pushing on its hood. He pushes off from the embankment with his foot. He looms over the car in the headlights, more attractive than I remember him looking at the bar. He’s contrite, and it complements him more than cockiness. I can see how strong he is; he’s in great shape for someone who must be in his late forties. His round, wire-framed glasses are the only indication that he’s a doctor. He has the body of some of my father’s friends, some of the cons Victor knew.
He drives slowly behind me, not too close. It’s reassuring to have him following me, an unlikely feeling I have a hard time settling into. The porch light is on, and I think Gina must have come by. I walk cautiously up the path to my cottage, and practically lose my footing when I notice King break the curtains, his nose moving from side to side excitably. I hold onto Joel’s arm and guide him quickly to the door, talking lovingly to King as I put the key in the lock.
Joel sits on the couch, and it takes King and me a while to calm down. I lay my purse on the chair and get on the floor with him.
‘I’ve never been apart from him since I found him over a year ago,’ I inform Joel. ‘I was in Florida for the past three days.’ I don’t tell him I was scattering my mother’s ashes.
‘That’s nice. I love Florida. Did you have a good trip?’
I’m still playing with King, but get up and offer him some tea. On my way into the kitchen, I call out, ‘I liked Miami Beach very much.’ I call King to the back door and let him out. I turn on the lights mounted to the back of the house; their illumination reaches almost to the edge of the pond. King bounds out the door and toward his favorite spot.
Joel leans back and crosses his legs when I hand him the cup and saucer. His demeanor changes; he possesses a kind of reasonableness that doesn’t seem too proud of itself. His posture conveys professional curiosity, a doctor’s interrogation style. But it doesn’t bother me. I only need him to be here in the room with me now, his car in front of the cottage discouraging anyone from thinking I’m alone. I don’t have to try to manipulate him, to get something out of him. I can’t help but notice that if his timing were different, I might be able to appreciate the questions he’s asking, and the willingness he attempts to express by asking them.
I take a bus to the doctor’s office. Dr Blaufarb. The psychiatrists have their offices in the nicest parts of town, a way of discouraging people whose problems have to do with money. People in Pacific Heights notice if you’ve been up for days. They look at you on the bus, take another seat. I notice a woman across from me, older, but perfect as a doll. Someone goes to the homes of these women and primps them; other women in white clinicians’ outfits carrying tackle boxes of makeups. These women have their hair and nails done at home. You can’t see what’s going on inside them because the cosmetologists make them opaque. The only way to hide what’s inside of me is to remove the insides. Any one of them can read my experience. Experience doesn’t mark these women.
I can hardly walk the three blocks from the bus stop. I’m stooped over, out of breath. I hold onto a telephone pole, walk a few steps further, collapse over a newspaper rack. My whole body is aching, trembling.
But it’s my head that’s driving me; I can’t stop thinking about the young, blue-eyed kid who sold me the coke and let me stay up doing it at his hotel. I can’t forget how on the second night he brought the pipe and introduced me to crack. And all along he kept telling me he couldn’t stop but he was sure he would have a heart attack. He must have weighed about a hundred pounds, so war-torn.
‘Nobody wants to spend any time with me. They say I’m crazy. But I just have to keep going with the shit. I can’t stop. But my heart; I’m so afraid of it.’
The dirt was in my blood and in my memories. How I told Victor I was pregnant, and how he said I’d need to stop using. How he shot up in front of me, and told me he was going to quit soon. He was going to be a good father to this baby. He took his syringe and buried the point into the cheap wall. It just hung there in the wall. I thought he did it so I couldn’t use the needle again. I had my own, kept a rig hidden in my drawer. He said I should go to a clinic; otherwise I might be held responsible if the baby was born addicted. You should go to a clinic too, I thought. Have them check to make sure your DNA isn’t as fucked up as your thinking.
Dr Blaufarb asks me into his office. It’s on the first floor, and outside a window I can see people walking by, shopping. They can’t see us. There’s a big leafy tree taking the light out of the room. He sits behind an enormous desk.
‘What brings you here?’ he asks.
‘I have terrible anxiety. I can’t sleep,’ I say to him. I’m kneading my hands. This is it, the end of it all. The end of the line.
‘Why is tha
t?’
‘I’m about to lose my job. I’m afraid of my health. My relationship isn’t healthy.’
‘Let’s start with your job,’ he says.
‘I haven’t been to work in over a week. I haven’t called to tell them what’s going on. Let’s not start there. Look, can you do anything for me because I’m about to go out of my mind.’
‘I can’t just take these feelings from you. I have to know where they’re coming from.’
I want to scream I just killed my baby during a two-day cocaine run. I was sitting on the toilet with a crack pipe in my mouth when I miscarried. There was a seventeen-year-old kid sitting outside the door wondering why I wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t cry. I thought he was a cop and I couldn’t open the door, couldn’t make a sound. Bleeding. The feelings are coming from a gap in my reason, bleeding through. Can you take them from me?
‘They’re coming from everywhere. They won’t let me sleep. I need you to help me. I need you to write me a script for sleeping pills. Then we can talk.’
I look at him, and know I’ve just dealt my last card. The end of the line.
You’re not asking me to give you drugs, are you?
‘I don’t know if I can help you. I can’t just write you a prescription for sleeping pills because you’ve asked for one.’
How did my mother do this? How did she suffer these judges?
You need to go to a clinic. What if the baby’s born addicted? They can put you away for that.
‘Why can’t you sleep?’ Dr Blaufarb asks. He can’t stand my silence; he’s a shrink, but he can’t stand silence, wants everything explicit. Hands over my stomach, holes for eyes. They can put you away for that.
